9/11 Commission

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Seal of the 9/11 Commission

The 9/11 Commission (English 9/11 Commission , full title: National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States ; sometimes Kean-Hamilton-Commission ) was a bipartisan committee of the US Congress . It existed from December 22, 2002 to August 21, 2004 and investigated the causes of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 in the USA .

Its final report of July 22, 2004, in accordance with the statutory commission's mandate, detailed the planning, preparation and implementation of the attacks, the initial reactions of the US authorities, the anti-terror policy of the US governments since 1993 and advance warnings. The main reason why the attacks were not prevented , he names the lack of cooperation between the CIA and FBI . From this he derives recommendations to the US government for necessary structural reforms in the authorities and other measures.

The Commission's report is a major source of historical research into the attacks. The main criticism was that he did not name those responsible for the failure of the authorities, did not include important files in the examination, did not mention some leads, did not pursue others, and also relied on statements made by Al-Qaeda members under torture .

prehistory

US President George W. Bush , his ministers and representatives of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) claimed again and again after September 11th that no one had foreseen such attacks and had warned against them. In the following years, however, the US media announced many previous similar attack plans and attempts:

  • In 1994, four Algerian Islamists hijacked a passenger plane and refueled it in order to fly it into the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
  • In 1995, police in Manila narrowly prevented " Operation Bojinka ", which two Islamists linked to Osama bin Laden had planned. The arrested Abdul Hakim Murad testified that he and Ramzi Ahmed Yousef had hijacked passenger planes and intended to fly to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia , the Pentagon or the World Trade Center (WTC). The Philippines had fully informed the FBI in 1995 of the results of the investigation; however, this had not followed the plan.
  • In 1996 Murad testified that he had learned to fly at four flight schools in the United States and that he wanted to use that for the plan. The FBI also discovered in 1998 that a follower of Bin Laden had attended a flight school in Oklahoma. Those who were arrested in the Al-Qaeda attacks on US embassies in East Africa said that bin Laden had often ordered supporters to learn to fly in the US, allegedly for civilian purposes. In August 2001, the FBI learned that Zacarias Moussaoui had also been a student pilot in Oklahoma at times. Nonetheless, FBI spokesmen claimed in May 2002 that no evidence of flight training by al-Qaida supporters in the United States had been found or that airplanes were used as weapons.
  • In August 1998, a British Islamist threatened bin Laden with crashing or hijacking a plane in order to humiliate the United States. The FAA mentioned the threat in its 1999 annual report.
  • In September 1999, a terrorist expert for the National Security Council described the scenario: “Suicide bombers belonging to the Al Qaeda Martyrs Battalion could crash a plane packed with highly explosive substances into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA or the White House. "
  • Before the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001 (July 20-22), several foreign intelligence agencies warned the US that Islamists working with bin Laden could crash a plane into the conference venue in order to kill Bush and other state leaders. US counter-terrorism experts dismissed the warning, but let Bush spend the night on an aircraft carrier. Italy's government blocked the airspace over Genoa, deployed anti-aircraft missiles and circled anti-aircraft jets. After September 11, 2001, Gianfranco Fini recalled Italy's attack warning to the USA.
  • On July 5, 2001, FBI agent Kenneth Williams wrote the "Phoenix Memo": Several Islamists had registered at a flight school in Phoenix, Arizona and were all too suspiciously interested in airport security. He and his supervisor strongly advised searching similar flight schools across the country to see if al-Qaeda was attempting to infiltrate US civil aviation. The FBI offices in Washington, DC and New York ignored the news.
  • On August 16, 2001, the FBI arrested Moussaoui for expressing an interest in flying a passenger jet at a flight school in Minneapolis , but not learning to take off and land. His flight instructors had warned the FBI that he could try to fly a fully fueled passenger jet into a building. An FBI official noted that Moussaoui was "the type of person who could fly something into the World Trade Center." The French secret service informed the FBI weeks before September 11th that Moussaoui was a dangerous Islamist. However, FBI lawyers denied the Phoenix request to search Moussaoui's PC and home. As it turned out after the attacks, the PC contained references to the assassins involved.
  • In mid-August 2001, the US immigration service notified the CIA that terror suspects Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi were in the US. The FBI then launched a search for the two but did not find them until September 11th.

Since December 2001 the Senators John McCain ( Republican Party ) and Joe Lieberman ( Democratic Party ) campaigned for a commission that should clear up such errors by the authorities. But they did not find a majority in the US Senate . At the initiative of Bob Graham (Democrats) and Porter Goss (Republicans), the relevant control committees of the US Congress jointly examined the intelligence activities before and after the 9/11 attacks ( Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 ). The 37-member commission examined around 500,000 intelligence documents and interviewed around 600 people in nine public and 13 non-public meetings. The CIA, FBI and White House hardly supported them, contrary to previous promises. Only 24 of the 800 pages of the final report were allowed to be published. The report revealed errors in the collection and exchange of intelligence, but it did not contain any documents on government behavior prior to the attacks. Bush refused to hand them over, citing the separation of powers .

On May 15, 2002, the US news broadcaster CBS reported : A President's Daily Brief (PDB) on August 6, 2001 warned Bush that an attack by bin Laden could include hijacking airplanes. Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said the PDB had not warned that suicide bombers could use planes as bombs. He did not disclose the text of the PDB. On May 19, 2002, The Washington Post announced the PDB's title: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US". This increased public pressure enormously to clarify the authorities' failure before September 11th. Senator Hillary Clinton and other Democrats called for the PDB to be published.

On May 16, 2002, Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said, “I don't think anyone could have predicted that these people would take a plane and ram it into the World Trade Center, take another and ram it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a rocket. ”Although the secret services had warned of an al-Qaeda attack in the USA since December 2000 and had suspected a major attack plan since May 2001, none of their indications were precise. Even when asked by Bush, they would not have informed the White House of developments that, viewed in retrospect, contained warnings. The puzzle pieces circulating in the lower authority levels were never put together because the authorities had not exchanged them or did not pursue them. Bush had not heard of Moussaoui's flight training or the Phoenix memo. It is unusual to inform the President of such details. The PDB of August 6, 2001 only appears significant afterwards. The warning about hijackings contained therein is based on an unconfirmed British intelligence report from 1998, which referred to the release of an al-Qaeda prisoner. It had been known since 1995 that Al-Qaeda could hijack planes for attacks in the USA. She emphasized, “It wasn't a warning. It doesn't mention a specific time, place or method. ”Before September 11th, they were looking for something completely different.

In fact, US intelligence agencies had warned at least twelve times since 1991 that Islamists could use hijacked planes as bombs. Kristen Breitweiser, a representative of the September 11 families of the victims, challenged Condoleezza Rice's claim. The victims' families demanded a comprehensive investigation of the causes of the attack by an independent commission with a comprehensive mandate, self-determined investigation methods and unlimited access to all relevant materials and witnesses. When the failure of the Joint Inquiry became apparent, they traveled to Washington DC in June 2002 and promoted the non-governmental commission there. Bush and most of the Republicans rejected their proposal: The Joint Inquiry had adequately examined the secret service behavior; another commission would divert the national leadership from the war on terror . However, more and more media reports about disregarded references to al-Qaeda’s terrorist plans and terrorist cells in the USA came to the aid of the victims’s families. McCain and Lieberman supported their cause.

Bush delayed approval of an independent commission for 14 months and tried to restrict its powers. He wanted to prevent a public discussion of his government's mistakes before 9/11. For their part, the Democrats feared the Commission would hold Bill Clinton's previous administration responsible. Under pressure from the "Jersey Girls" (four widows from New Jersey : Lorie Van Auken, Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Mindy Kleinberg), the White House finally approved a draft of the House of Representatives on November 15, 2002 consists of five Republican and Democratic representatives and is granted 18 months for hearings. She should be allowed to question anyone who wanted to summon at least six commissioners, including representatives of the secret services, immigration authorities and diplomats. John McCain should appoint his party's representatives, Bush should appoint the chairman of the commission. The remaining members should be nominated by December 15, 2002.

Commission

Members

The ten commissioners

On November 28, 2002, Bush appointed former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as chair of the commission. The Democrats named George J. Mitchell vice chairman. The victims' families rejected Kissinger because he had financial and political connections to Saudi Arabia, including the Bin Laden family . They only wanted to support the commission if all of its members discovered their sources of income and economic relationships. On December 14th, Kissinger resigned because he did not want to name the customers of his business consulting firm. Mitchell had also resigned a few days earlier because of a conflict of interest in favor of his company.

On December 17, Bush named former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean as its new chairman. The Democrats named Lee H. Hamilton as his partner. In addition to them, the US Congress selected eight MPs for the investigation. For the Republicans:

For the Democrats:

These ten members mainly conducted the public interviews with witnesses and gave statements on the course of the investigation. The actual work, requesting, collecting and evaluating relevant documents as well as preparing the final report was the responsibility of a staff of 78 members. Its directors were Executive Director Philip Zelikow and his deputy Christopher Kojm. Daniel Marcus was chief advisor, Al Felzenberg was the commission's press spokesman.

The victims' families formed the twelve-member Family Steering Committee , which the "Jersey Girls" joined. They accepted Kean as the new chairman, but continuously accompanied the investigation with questions, criticism and demands. They were therefore attacked by Republicans and thereby become their political opponents. Above all, the victims' relatives wanted to find out and establish the personal responsibility of members of the authorities for the occurrence of the attacks. For this purpose, the family committee gave the commission a list of 57 questions that the investigation had to answer before its first meeting. At the first meeting on January 28, 2003, the commission decided to disclose all sources of income for its members and to remove them from areas of investigation where financial conflicts of interest were possible.

Commission seal

assignment

The Commission should answer the two main questions:

  1. How did the attacks happen?
  2. How can such attacks be prevented in the future?

It received its mandate on November 27, 2002 through a law drafted by Congress. It called for “identification of all facts and circumstances pertaining to the attacks, including those relating to information services, law enforcement, diplomacy, immigration issues, border control, financial flows to terrorist organizations, commercial aviation, the role of congressional oversight, resource allocation and other areas which the Commission has to determine as relevant. "

The examination should primarily:

  • Completely reconstruct the preparation and process of the attacks,
  • evaluate the work of the authorities and organs of the armed forces responsible for the defense of the USA against such attacks,
  • Prepare proposals to prevent future attacks.

The commission should present its results to Congress, the President and the public in a jointly prepared report. She should not investigate the physical causes of the collapse of the buildings affected by the attacks. For this purpose, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) received their own investigations that were coordinated with the commission.

Chairs Kean and Hamilton had never worked together before but got on well. Despite resistance in the commission, they held on to Philip Zelikow as chief of staff in order to use his relationship with the White House to inspect files. In 2006, they said they knew that the commission was doomed, or that it was set up to do so. One expected their fragmentation along party lines, loss of credibility through the leakage of secret information, denial of the access necessary for the task and alienation from the victims' families. The limited time and funding made the task even more difficult.

examination

Battle for documents

Significant conflicts arose between the Commission and federal agencies during the investigation. Initially, these provided only small amounts of the millions of documents requested. The Department of Defense (DoD) and Justice Department in particular delayed their release. Bush initially forbade government members to be questioned individually and demanded that the interrogations take place in the presence of other members of the government. In July 2003, the Commission Chairs denounced this practice as intimidation and questioned the timely conclusion of their investigation. Thereupon Bush announced that he had instructed the authorities to cooperate fully and quickly.

On October 15, 2003, the commission forced the FAA to release video tapes, interview and testimony transcripts from employees with a threat of punishment ( Subpoena ). She also used this legal remedy against the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) to get other authorities to cooperate more quickly. FAA and NORAD complied. On October 26, 2003, the Commission threatened the White House with a subpoena to release PDBs to Bush in the weeks leading up to the attacks. Bush refused again: the PDBs concern national security; their release would jeopardize their secrecy and the rights of the executive. Government members feared that some PDBs could claim that the government had prior knowledge of the attacks. In November 2003, the commission chairs reached a compromise with Bush: The White House granted two commissioners (Zelikow and Gorelick) access to all PDBs and released selected copies of them. The PDB of August 6, 2001 remained secret. The commissioners should hand in their notes and submit the summary of PDBs to the White House for review before the rest of the commission received them. Max Cleland and the victims' families strictly rejected this agreement as a breach of the Commission's mandate for unlimited access to files. This is one of the reasons why Cleland announced in December 2003 that he would leave the Commission.

On December 4, 2003, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg turned over a subpoena record of 911 calls from September 11, 2001 to the Commission . He had previously refused to release them as an invasion of the privacy of victims. Personal names were blackened in; In return, commission members were given 14 hours a day to inspect the uncensored original documents.

On February 5, 2004, the Commission's White House extended the deadline for finalizing its report to the end of July 2004. Critics suspected that the administration was trying to prevent an investigation beyond 2004 into Bush's re-election campaign. On March 31, 2004, following public allegations by counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke and increased pressure from the Jersey Girls, Bush granted the Commission expanded access to recordings of his private conversations with Vice President Dick Cheney prior to September 11th.

Surveys

The commission evaluated over 2.5 million pages of documents and interviewed over 1,200 people from ten countries. 160 of them were direct witnesses to the attacks. For 19 days, she interviewed high-ranking former and current government officials under oath, publicly and with recordings of their statements on various topics:

For each public hearing, the Commission published a staff report with the findings to date on the subject of the hearing. The staff reports and recorded testimony appeared in May 2004 as a book ( The 9/11 Investigations ), which anticipated the main content of the final report.

Bush had only allowed Condoleezza Rice to testify if the commission questioned him and Dick Cheney in a non-public, sworn, and unrecorded manner. The democratic commissioners then made this condition valid for the previous government.

  • April 9, 2004: Closed interrogation of Ex-President Bill Clinton and Ex-Vice President Al Gore
  • April 29, 2004: Private interrogation of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Alert controversy

The public hearings of Richard Clarke (April 24, 2004) and Condoleezza Rice (April 8, 2004) were eagerly awaited because of their explosive nature. Both represented opposing lines of anti-terrorism policy. Clarke has been an uninterrupted anti-terrorist expert for various US governments since 1992. In 1998, Bill Clinton approved his concept of a cross-agency Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG) and made him the national counter-terrorism coordinator. However, he had no decision-making authority. In 1998 he drafted the plan to capture or kill Osama bin Laden with covert military actions in Afghanistan and to arm the Northern Alliance and the Predator drone. Clinton affirmed the plan, but no longer carried out it. Condoleezza Rice demoted Clarke on January 3, 2001: he was no longer allowed to attend cabinet meetings and was only allowed to deliver notes to state secretaries who regularly returned them. On January 25, 2001, five days after Bush took office, Clarke presented his plan to Rice, urging that the destruction of al-Qaeda be made a priority and that the National Security Council (NSC) be convened to do so . The meeting did not take place until September 4, 2001. Bush only met with Clarke after the attacks.

On March 22, 2004, his book Against All Enemies was published , in which he accused the Bush administration of neglecting al-Qaeda in favor of the desired Iraq war . As a result, Bush and other members of the government tried to devalue him as a professionally frustrated outsider and partisan of the Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry . Clarke then categorically ruled out any office under Kerry. The White House only released his book after three months of review, so it could only appear late. He recalled his early push for an NSC resolution on al-Qaeda. With regular meetings of the NSC like in 1999, the CIA and FBI could have been alerted much more effectively, thus discovering the whereabouts of al-Qaida members in the USA and arresting them in good time.

As the first and only government official, Clarke apologized to the victims' families at the beginning of his hearing: “Your government has failed, those you have entrusted your protection have failed, and I have failed. We tried, but it doesn't matter because we failed. ”He asked her forgiveness . Republicans Fred F. Fielding and James R. Thompson questioned Clarke's credibility because he praised Bush's anti-terrorism policies in 2002. They referred to an anonymous press release that the Fox News Channel published shortly before the hearing and named Clarke as the author. The White House allowed the broadcaster to do so. Bush's legal advisor, Alberto R. Gonzales , had spoken to the two commissioners. The Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who was then questioned, confirmed Clarke's statement that the fight against terrorism was important for Bush, but not urgent.

Because the White House had agreed on more than twenty interviews with Condoleezza Rice and other Bush advisors after Clarke's first appearance in the media, Bush's refusal to allow Rice to testify to the commission could not be upheld. On April 8, 2004, she first declared her previous anti-terrorism policy: Al-Qaeda had been recognized as a great danger from the start and Clinton's team of experts had therefore been retained. Bush did not just react to individual attacks by Al Qaeda, but wanted to destroy the network as a whole. To this end, a comprehensive strategy had been drawn up by September 2001. To respond to the increased risk of attack, one relied on Clarke's team, the CSG. The intercepted threats did not contain any information about the perpetrators, places, times or methods and mostly referred to overseas. Despite unclear warnings, she had raised the alert among many authorities. If anything could have prevented the attacks, it would be better information about dangers within the US. Structural and legal barriers would have made it difficult to collect and exchange information between the judiciary and secret services. Only the attacks would have opened up the chance to tear down these barriers. Thanks to Bush's determined leadership, this was initiated by the USA PATRIOT Act , for example .

It was asked whether after taking office she had ever heard that Al-Qaeda could use planes as bombs, whether she had ever reported to Bush about terrorist cells in the US, and whether the PDB had not warned of possible attacks in the US on August 6, 2001 and she remembered its title. To which she replied: In her press release on that PDB she should not have said “nobody…” but “I could not imagine the use of airplanes as bombs”. To their knowledge, this possibility did not appear in any danger notice to them, presumably because the secret services classified it as speculative in 2001. She was not aware of any older hazard warnings from 1998 and 1999. The PDB gave Bush an overview of historical terrorist threats and named ongoing FBI investigations, but did not demand any action. She does not remember whether she discussed these investigations with Bush. She paraphrased the title ("Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States"), but stuck with it: The PDB was not an acute warning of attacks in the USA, but historical information based on old intelligence reports. She also claimed that the FBI had warned all stations under this PDB. Commissioners contradicted this directly: No such warning was found in thousands of FBI files. No FBI employee interviewed remembered it. John Podesta , Chief of Staff of the Clinton White House, called on the same day for the full text of the PDB to be released.

That happened on April 10, 2004. The PDB recalled bin Laden's 1997 announcement to “take the fight to America”, as the 1993 assassins had done. To this end, he tried to recruit supporters with US visas. He plans attacks years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks. Al-Qaeda members, including some US citizens, have lived in the US or have entered the country for years. There is also a support network. Reports that bin Laden wanted to have a US plane hijacked in order to free imprisoned al-Qaeda members have not been confirmed. However, the FBI noticed suspicious activity in the United States that indicated preparations for hijacking aircraft or other types of attack, including recent observations of government buildings in New York. The FBI is currently conducting 70 bin Laden-related investigations in the United States.

The Center for American Progress published a fact check that contradicted many of Rice's statements with other testimony before the commission and media reports. The Bush administration cut various parts of Clinton's anti-terror program, upgraded the Predator but not used it, and only approved the goal of destroying Al Qaeda after the attacks.

Controversy over the Iraq war

In 2003, Max Cleland urged a thorough investigation into whether Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks, as claimed by the Bush administration. He assumed that she had used this as a pretext for the Iraq war (March to May 2003), but remained an outsider in the commission. Instead, Philip Zelikow invited Laurie Mylroie as a witness in July 2003. She represented the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute and claimed that Iraq had been involved in all previous major terrorist attacks against the US since 1990 and that more were planned. In doing so, she justified the overthrow of Saddam without evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Zelikow then demanded that it be recorded that a collaboration between bin Laden and Saddam was possible before September 11th. The Commission rejected this.

In March 2004, journalist Jim Mann announced that Zelikow had been campaigning for Saddam Hussein's overthrow since June 2002 and that in September 2002 he had anonymously authored a strategy paper for preventive wars (the “Bush Doctrine”) with which Bush had legitimized the Iraq war in 2003. Zelikow had kept his authorship and regular contacts with Condoleezza Rice and Bush's chief adviser Karl Rove secret from the commission. The first witness, Abraham David Sofaer ( Hoover Institution ) summoned by Zelikow , had advocated preventive wars before the commission. Zelikow was then accused of using the commission to justify the Iraq war. The Family Steering Committee and some commissioners petitioned Zelikov's exclusion from the commission because he was too close to the Bush administration.

According to Richard Clarke's book, Bush, Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld were determined to overthrow Saddam Hussein by the spring of 2001. On September 12, 2001, Bush had ultimately asked him, Clarke, to look again for evidence of Iraq's support for the attacks, which the CIA had already explicitly examined and excluded. In an interview in March 2004, he affirmed: Bush had given him and his staff the clear impression in a very intimidating way that they should lay an Iraqi hand behind the attacks because Bush and his advisors wanted to attack Iraq before he took office. Condoleezza Rice told the commission: The assumption that Iraq could be behind the attacks was reasonable because of its hostility to the US. However, Bush initially gave priority to the war in Afghanistan against the advice of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. She could not testify to Bush's demand for evidence from Clarke. They exclude that Bush urges someone to assert false facts.

911report cover HIGHRES.png

report

Emergence

Ernest May, a lead author of the report, described its creation in 2005. Initially, Zelikow, May, Kean and Hamilton decided not only to present the failure of US authorities, but also the historical development of Al Qaeda, and not only to list the results, but to embed them in a long-term historical narrative. Then Zelikow and May designed an outline with originally 16 chapters, subsections and headings by mid-March 2003. This draft was initially not put up for discussion in the staff, in order to avoid partisan disputes. A staff group was assigned to each chapter topic to write timelines and preliminary staff reports. The narrative concept and the limited time influenced the selection of the staff: around 50 members were members of the government who already had security clearances. Some like Douglas MacEachin and Michael Hurley had years of experience in analyzing and interacting with intelligence agencies that facilitated access to documents. In June 2003 the narrative concept was presented to the staff and accepted without any problems. At the suggestion of Tim Roemer and Fred Fielding, the course of September 11th was moved as the first chapter before the development of Al Qaeda. The planned six final sections with recommendations have been summarized in two chapters. The staff report on advance warnings from 2001 was supplemented in full as a separate chapter. Zelikow, May, Kojm and Marcus edited the staff reports and ensured the uniform style. The ten commission officers checked and accepted the wording of the final version.

The Commission unanimously approved the report and stressed the independence, impartiality and thoroughness of its investigation. On August 21, 2004, she ceased work as required by law and moved all of her records to the US National Archives. The usual confidentiality period of 20 years has been shortened. On January 2, 2009, the recordings were released and posted on the Commission's website. Below that are the transcripts and videos of all public hearings.

structure

  • The preceding executive summary summarizes the most important results of the study.
  • The foreword by the two chairpersons reminds of the creation and mission of the commission.
  • Part 1 ("We Have Some Planes") describes in detail the course of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, from the arrival of the perpetrators at the airports to the impact of the four hijacked flights and the immediate reactions of the US military.
  • Part 2 ("The Foundation of the New Terrorism") describes the emergence of the Al-Qaida terror network since 1988.
  • Part 3 (“Counterterrorism” evolves) and 4 (“Responses to al Qaeda's Initial Assaults”) describe the United States' previous counter-terrorism measures.
  • Part 5 ("Al Qaeda Aims at the American Homeland") describes the emerging plan of Al-Qaeda to attack targets in the United States.
  • Part 6 ("From Threat to Threat") describes the Al-Qaeda attack on the WTC in 1993, the terrorist attacks on the US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in 1998 and on the USS Cole in 2000.
  • Part 7 ("The Attack Looms") describes the concrete preparation for the attacks of September 11, 2001.
  • Part 8 ("The System Was Blinking Red") describes the warning signs that the US secret services received and how to deal with them.
  • Part 9 (“Heroism and Horror”) describes the emergency measures taken by the authorities immediately after the attacks.
  • Part 10 ("Wartime") describes the introduction and goals of the US war on terrorism.
  • Part 11 ("Foresight and Hindsight") summarizes the mistakes and deficiencies of the authorities in retrospect that made the attacks possible.
  • Part 12 (“What to do? A Global Strategy”) and 13 (“How to do it? A Different Way of Organizing the Government”) recommend a political approach and structural reforms to prevent such attacks in the future.

The report is preceded by a list of abbreviations and an index of names, a list of the hearings and a section of footnotes arranged by chapters.

History and course of the attacks

The investigation up to June 20, 2004 revealed that, according to statements by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed , ten planes were originally supposed to be hijacked and thus also nuclear power plants in the USA were to be hijacked . Taliban leader Mohammed Omar rejected the plan because he feared retaliatory attacks by the United States. Bin Laden then reduced the targets to four and had his camps evacuated in July 2001. He personally selected the future pilots. Mohammed Atta , leader of the later assassins, needed more time to form the team, which has now grown to 19 people. That delayed the attacks by two months. Indications of suspicious flight training were ignored at FBI headquarters. On September 11, the FAA's reports to NORAD for each of the four aircraft came too late because of the long chains of command and communication breakdowns. Two interceptors were chasing the wrong aircraft and were too far away to catch the right one. Cheney's kill order came after the last machine crashed and was not passed on to the pilots.

The summary names the 19 hijackers that Al-Qaeda recruited, trained and financed in Afghanistan as the executing perpetrators . Her motives are anti-Western and anti-modern Islamist ideology , revenge for the perceived colonial humiliation of Muslims, for US policy in the Middle East, such as the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, and the endeavor to make Al Qaeda attractive to other jihadists do. At the beginning of 1999, your client Osama bin Laden took over an idea from Chalid for the "aircraft operation". He developed the idea with Mohammed Atef for the attack plan of September 11th.

Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar entered the United States unnoticed on January 15, 2000. They lived inconspicuously under their real names and quickly made like-minded friends from Yemen and Saudi Arabia. No evidence was found for an existing support network. By summer 2000, three future hijackers from the Hamburg terror cell had entered the country and started pilot training. At the beginning of 2001, two other perpetrators who had entered the country renewed their previous pilot training in Arizona. Atta only became their leader in the USA.

In retrospect, problems with Al-Qaeda in preparing for the attack were uncovered: Several planned accomplices were not granted entry visas, one jumped. The alleged replacement pilot Moussaoui was arrested on August 16, 2001 for suspicious behavior during his pilot training. At the end of August, intelligence officials discovered that the two al-Qaida members monitored until the end of 1999 were in the United States. However, these late individual lanes did not reach the management level of the authorities and were not linked to one another, so that no immediate measures were taken.

On September 11, 2001, all 19 assassins could easily have passed the airport controls, taken the unprepared flight crews by surprise and took over the cockpits. The existing operational regulations of the FAA and NORAD did not in any way apply to the use of hijacked aircraft that had disappeared from the radar as weapons. Neither the civilians responsible nor the military knew how to handle it and had to improvise. Interceptors had ascended, but NORAD received a launch order much too late and did not pass it on to the pilots. The emergency measures in New York were just as improvised and chaotic.

USA anti-terror policy

It is true that these attacks were much more carefully considered, more precise and more destructive than any of the previous attacks by al-Qaeda. Nevertheless, they should not have surprised the USA, since the intention to mass murder by Islamist extremists had been known since 1993 and bin Laden had been classified as the planner, not just the financier, of the attacks on American embassies since 1998. The American secret services regularly learned of Al-Qaeda's plans to attack, arrested some members and thus prevented attacks on the Millennium in December 1999 . But al-Qaida remained essentially intact.

For the attack on the USS Cole in October 2000, Al-Qaida perpetrators could be proven, but no Bin Laden commission. The Clinton administration warned the Afghan Taliban of any further attack by bin Laden on the USA, tried unsuccessfully diplomatically to extradite him and considered a covert attack on him. However, it did not decide to take any direct military action in order not to take sides in the Northern Alliance's civil war against the Taliban. The CIA tried to gather more information about Al-Qaeda with a Predator drone.

Even after taking office, Bush decided not to react to the attack on the USS Cole. Bin Laden could have concluded from this that such attacks were safe for him. The Bush administration sought to eliminate al-Qaeda within three to five years. In addition, in the summer of 2001 Bush requested a program for more covert actions in Afghanistan, diplomatic strategies and the equipment of the Predator with missiles. On September 4, 2001, his security advisers approved the program; on September 11th it was on Bush's desk for signature.

In the spring and summer of 2001, the secret services were constantly warned of a "very, very large" attack plan by Al-Qaeda. Like Clinton before, Bush was warned in one of the daily reports in August 2001: "Bin Laden is determined to strike in the US". But despite the title, the specific information only referred overseas, where various safety precautions were taken. Unlike in 2000, domestic authorities were not effectively mobilized. The media had hardly paid attention to the terror threats this time either.

Advance warnings from 2001

Part 8 sets out the forewarnings Bush, Cheney, and Rice received in the eight months leading up to September 11, 2001. Among them were 40 PDBs created by CIA employees on the subject of Al Qaeda. Since the commission was only allowed to read them, not to copy them or to quote them, the section mainly reports reports by anti-terrorism experts. They were mostly worded in general terms and related to US institutions abroad. Some threats concerned the US itself.

  • March 2001: CIA sets the terror warning level to its highest level since the millennium.
  • March 23: Clarke warns Rice of car bombing against the White House. There are probably terrorist cells in the USA.
  • April 13: FBI urges all staff to report any evidence of Sunni extremists to headquarters.
  • April 19: CIA: "Bin Laden is planning multiple operations."
  • May 2001: PDB title: "Bin Laden's public profile may require attack"; "Bin Laden's network wants to lead the way". The FBI receives warnings of planned attacks on London, Boston and New York.
  • May 16: US embassy receives an anonymous call: Bin Laden supporters were planning an attack with "highly explosive" material in the US.
  • May 17th: CSG: "OBL: Operation planned in the USA"
  • May 24th: Anonymous phone call: Cell in Canada is planning an attack in the US.
  • May 29: Clarke suggests Rice ask Tenet what more the US could do about Abu Subaida's plans for a "series of major attacks" against Israel and / or US institutions.
  • End of May: FAA warns all airlines of a possible hijacking of aircraft to free Al Qaeda members detained in the US.
  • June 12: CIA: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed recruits followers of Bin Laden to enter the USA, to meet with like-minded people who have previously entered the country and to arrange attacks.
  • June 22nd: CIA: Al Qaida's suicide attack on US targets possible in the next few days. The State Department warns all US embassies as well.
  • June 21: US Central Command raises alert levels for US forces in six states, disengages a fleet, and halts a maneuver. Some US embassies are closing.
  • June 25th: Clarke informs Rice and Stephen Hadley : Six foreign intelligence agencies warn of al-Qaida attacks. Arab TV report: Bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders are looking forward to "important surprises" in the coming weeks. A new promotional video for Al Qaeda has appeared.
  • June 28: Clarke writes to Rice: Al-Qaeda activity pointing to attack plans has grown steadily over the past six weeks. Most of the Bin Laden network is expecting a major terrorist attack in July, something "very, very, very, very big," according to one report.
  • June 30th: CIA instructs all of its stations to inform their host states about al-Qaeda and to demand immediate action against terrorist cells in their country. Titled "Bin Laden Plots High Profile Attacks," the report points to the catastrophic effects expected by al-Qaeda leaders. Saudi Arabia declared the highest level of terrorist alert on the same day. 20 other states are taking action against cells close to Al Qaeda and arresting some members.
  • End of June: Report on the threat of terrorism warns of a likely “spectacular” attack that will soon result in many fatalities. PDB title: "Bin Laden attacks could be imminent", "Bin Laden and allies make close threats". In the next 14 days "multiple attacks" are to be expected, including a "hard blow" against the interests of Israel and the USA.
  • July 2: FBI sends summary of bin Laden's latest threats to federal agencies. There are no indications of a credible threat of terrorist attacks in Germany, but this cannot be ruled out. During the national holiday (July 4th) one should be extremely vigilant and report suspicious activity to the FBI.
  • July 5: Clarke briefs security officers on multiple domestic agencies including FAA, Customs, Immigration and Naturalization. Most participants later report that they were instructed not to make the information public.
  • July 6: CIA informs CSG: Al-Qaeda members believed the upcoming attack was "spectacular", qualitatively different from all their previous acts.
  • July 9: Clarke briefs 37 government building security experts on the "current level of threat" and advises extreme vigilance. They should decide whether their authority needs extended protective measures.
  • July 19: FBI Director Thomas Pickard: FBI special agents are to form immediate response teams in the event of an attack. You are not given an assignment to determine and interrupt possible attack plans in the USA.

Reports began to arrive in mid-July that bin Laden's plans were being postponed for up to two months. On July 31, the FAA warned aviation of imminent terrorist attacks, particularly in Arabia and / or Israel. There is no credible evidence of plans to attack civilian domestic flights, but it is known that some active terrorist groups plan and train aircraft hijackings.

In response to several inquiries, on August 6th, Bush received a PDB on possible domestic attacks for the first time. The commission report quotes it and reports on Bush's statement to the commission: He had taken the PDB as a historical review and was reassured that the FBI was investigating. Action did not ask for it. An NSC meeting did not follow. Bush and his advisors no longer discussed possible domestic attacks. George Tenet visited Bush again on August 17 but could not recall any discussion with him about domestic threats.

Failures

According to the report, the US authorities failed to exhaust many options that could have thwarted the attack plan. One has

  • Monitored al-Qaeda members and other terrorist suspects were not placed on no-fly lists
  • did not follow the onward journey of Hazmi and Mihdhar after their last sighting (January 2000)
  • their entry visas and contacts with USS Cole bombers not reported to the FBI
  • False statements in visa applications and manipulated passports not discovered
  • Persons named by the CAPPS screening system are not compared with flight passenger lists
  • insufficient attempts to track down terrorist suspects in the United States
  • Moussaoui's reason for detention and his interest in flight training for suspected terrorist attacks were not associated with the reported increased risk of attacks
  • No obstacles were created to prevent possible hijacking of aircraft for suicide bombings, such as reinforcing cockpit doors.

Because of the flexibility of the attackers and the different means they used, it could not be said whether a single or some of the possible steps had prevented the attack. It is certain that no US government action between 1998 and 2001 disrupted or even slowed down the attack plan.

In all areas of government there have been failures in imagination, politics, means and management. The most important thing was the lack of imagination. The rulers did not fully understand the severity of the threat and its new quality compared to well-known terrorist threats. Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were not a main topic of debate and hardly appeared in the 2000 presidential election campaign . Terrorism was not a priority national security problem for either Clinton or Bush. Until September 4, 2001, according to Richard Clarke, the government had left it open whether it would treat al-Qaeda as the main threat.

For both the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, a US invasion of Afghanistan before 9/11 was practically inconceivable. Instead, attempts were made to fight al-Qaeda with insufficient resources from the late Cold War period . The CIA had too few agents on site and hardly any personnel for paramilitary operations and did not ask for them until the attacks. The DoD never focused on Al-Qaeda and only looked outward when it came to national defense. NORAD has hardly maintained an operational alarm base and at most expected aircraft hijackings overseas. The FBI was unable to link the intelligence gathered by agents on the ground to national priorities and was hampered by other domestic services.

The FAA never considered the possibility of suicide hijackings and failed to train flight personnel for such cases, to expand no-fly lists, to screen passengers, to hire federal marshals as flight safety attendants and to reinforce the cockpit doors. The new threat was not noticed at all.

The crisis management has not been adapted to the challenges of the 21st century. Action officials would have had access to all available knowledge about Al-Qaeda, information would have been shared, responsibilities clearly defined, and the outdated separation of domestic and foreign policy had to be overcome. Tenet's order of December 4, 1998 not to save resources and personnel in view of the war with terrorists had hardly any effect and did not change the course of the secret services. The government has not found a way to merge information, then develop plans for joint operations by the CIA, FBI, State Department, military and domestic authorities responsible for security and assign their implementation to responsible authorities.

Conduct of the CIA

An interim report by the 9/11 Commission described the US practice of circumventing missing extradition agreements for arrested terror suspects by flying secret flights to the US or third countries. The commission had tried unsuccessfully to learn more about the CIA interrogations of al-Qaeda prisoners. Her report therefore attached the caveat to all statements made by al-Qaeda prisoners:

“Determining the truth of what these witnesses - sworn enemies of the United States - are saying is a challenge. Our access to them has been limited to reviewing intelligence reports based on communications received from those locations where the actual interrogation takes place. We submitted questions for use in these interrogations but had no control over whether, when, or how questions of particular interest were asked. We were also not allowed to speak to the interrogators in order to better assess the credibility of the prisoners and to clear up ambiguities in the reports. "

Ernest May declared in 2005: The CIA had given the commission to the best of his knowledge all interrogation records for September 11th. The latter never trusted the anonymized prisoner testimony, but did not attempt to lift the CIA ban on direct questioning, probably because it consisted of many former or still active CIA officials.

The report notes that the US must fight an ideology, not just individuals, and therefore recommends: “We should offer an example of moral leadership in the world, commit to treat people humanely, obey the rule of law , and be generous and be caring to our neighbors. ”The US and some of its allies do not currently accept the full application of the Geneva Conventions to captured terrorists. Instead, the US should agree humane treatment of captured terrorists with friendly states, based on Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions on Armed Conflict. This prohibits cruel and degrading treatment and torture .

FBI conduct

The Joint Inquiry had already revealed that FBI agent Kenneth Williams had explicitly linked suspicious student pilots in Phoenix to al-Qaeda. On May 8, 2002, FBI Director Robert Mueller admitted that the FBI warning should have been followed up more closely. However, she would not have uncovered the 9/11 plan, as none of the suspected student pilots were involved.

FBI officer Coleen Rowley applied for a search warrant for his notebook after Moussaoui's arrest and interrogation in August 2001, but was turned down. She contradicted Mueller's claim on May 21, 2002 in a thirteen-page protest letter that she delivered personally to his office and the Joint Inquiry . A timely review of Moussaoui's contacts might have led to the arrest of two other 9/11 perpetrators. Colleagues and superiors have deliberately obstructed their investigations into Moussaoui.

Mueller handed her letter to the Inspector General of the Ministry of Justice, who carefully examined the allegations in parallel with the 9/11 Commission. Ten examiners carried out 226 surveys and thus clarified, among other things, the processes surrounding the Phoenix memo. The report, which was completed in November 2004, was published in full in 2006 following the conclusion of the criminal case against Moussaoui. The 9/11 Commission called Rowley as a witness, had the Inspector General's report sent to them, and included part of it in its own final report.

Relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda

The final report mentions interrogations of captured terrorists or terror suspects in other countries ( rendition ). Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi mentions a footnote : This Libyan was arrested in Pakistan in December 2001 as the alleged head of an al-Qaeda training camp and flown to Egypt for questioning. There he testified that Iraq had trained al-Qaida members in the construction and use of chemical weapons , but retracted this statement in January 2004. The CIA then withdrew all reports based on it.

On June 16, 2004, the commission published a staff report on Al Qaeda. Thereafter, there was no evidence of Saddam Hussein's cooperation with Al-Qaeda, toleration of Al-Qaeda cells in Iraq or their financial or logistical support. Al-Qaida's requests in the 1990s to allow training camps in Iraq were either rejected or never answered by Saddam. There was never a meeting between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi secret service officer in Prague. The evidence cited for this is misleading and false. The final report confirmed this result. He thus confirmed statements by the Czech President Václav Havel and the CIA Director George Tenet, who had denied Atta's alleged stay in Prague in 2002 as unproven. Yet Bush and Cheney repeated these and other unsubstantiated claims in early 2003 in the United States to justify the Iraq war.

Bush stated on June 17, 2004 that his administration had never claimed that Iraq and Al-Qaeda planned the attacks together. However, there was a lot of contact between them. Saddam offered the terrorist Abū Musʿab al-Zarqāwī a safe haven. On July 5, 2004, David Corn pointed out that Zarqawi only became the leader of a terrorist group in Iraq from September 2002, which was fighting against Saddam and was fought by him.

recommendations

The commission recommended that the incumbent US administration undertake extensive reform of the intelligence system, including the merging of the management levels of 28 government agencies dealing with national security in a national counter-terrorism center, which should be led by a "national director of intelligence". Their control by the US Congress should be improved as well as the flow of information within the FBI, the exchange of information between the authorities should be more transparent on many levels and the transition from one government to the next should be smoother.

Paragraph and literary quality

At the request of the commission, the report appeared in the US without preprints on the closing date, July 22, 2004. The first edition of 600,000 copies was sold in one week. About two million units were sold in eight months. By March 2005, the report had been downloaded 6.9 million times from the Internet . This made it the US government's best-selling publication. The publisher with the cheapest offer ($ 10 for the paperback edition) received the print job free of charge. In 2005 he announced that he would donate $ 600,000 of his earnings to three university institutes.

The report was praised as understandable and exciting. Unlike most government reports, it reads like a novel. Richard Posner found it "unusually fluid, even captivating", free of official language, direct and stylistically uniform despite the collective of authors: "an unlikely literary triumph". Analysis and recommendations, however, are not impressive. Ben Yagoda found the brief narrative writing style and factual accuracy of the report exemplary. Right from the start, he described precisely what different people were doing on the morning of September 11th, thus winning the reader's attention and dragging them into the gradient of the parallel storylines. The commission deliberately avoided using judgmental adjectives in order to maintain the consensus of the authors.

At the publisher's suggestion, the National Book Foundation nominated the report as one of five finalists in the non-fiction category for the National Book Award 2004. This sparked controversy. Cultural critic Benjamin DeMott called the nomination a "political and literary scandal". The style of an entertaining detective novel misses the educational purpose of the report and reveals the victims' relatives who deserve this clarification. Other authors interpreted the list as a political choice that was not the responsibility of the book award. Richard Posner turned down the non-fiction prize for the report because it was analytically unsound. Arthur M. Schlesinger, on the other hand, defended the report as a worthy candidate because of its completeness. The main authors Philip Zelikow and Ernest May welcomed the nomination as recognition of a joint achievement. The report cites a variety of sources to enable its readers to make their own judgment. It was therefore deliberately published in the middle of the election campaign. The direct style along the facts reduced bias.

Deficiencies in sources

Withheld interrogation recordings

On December 6, 2007, it became known that the CIA had videotaped many torture interrogations of Al-Qaeda detainees in 2002 and withheld the recordings from the 9/11 Commission, contrary to their requests. Jose A. Rodriguez , then head of the National Clandestine Service , had at least two of the videotapes destroyed in November 2005 showing the interrogation of Abu Subaida and Abd al Rashim al Nashiri.

Subsequently, Philip Zelikow drafted a memorandum of the Commission's motions for evidence to the CIA and their reactions to it, which the New York Times published on December 13, 2007. After that, the first application concerned interrogations of people whose recordings were later destroyed. The Commission had explicitly requested all kinds of documents, information and materials relevant to its investigation and also requested the handover of material that it did not specifically request. After receiving the interrogation reports, she asked in detail about the methodology of the interrogations in order to better assess the reliability of the prisoner's statements. Because she was unsatisfied with the answers from the CIA, she tried unsuccessfully to interview the inmates herself. CIA officials said that all of the material requested had been made available without ever mentioning the videotapes. Whether that was a criminal offense must be investigated.

A CIA spokesman said the videotapes were initially kept for the commission, but the commission never specifically asked about them. Kean and Hamilton said the CIA made a conscious decision to obstruct the commission. They turned the memorandum over to judicial and congressional investigators. On January 2, 2008, they affirmed in a joint press release: The destruction of the videos was an obstruction, since the commission had repeatedly requested the CIA to hand over all relevant interrogation records since June 2003 and had never heard of video tapes.

Able Danger

From June 2005, Republican Congressman Curt Weldon announced the Able Danger military surveillance program that the Pentagon had operated from 1999 to April 2001 at the latest. According to five of its employees, it had discovered four al-Qaeda members who had entered the US by mid-2000, including Mohammed Atta. Pentagon lawyers have forbidden the disclosure of this information to the FBI. On the instructions of the United States Special Operations Command , all data were deleted and the program ended in spring 2001. Anthony Shaffer , liaison officer to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), stated on August 12, 2005 that he had informed Philip Zelikow about Able Danger and that Atta had been discovered in October 2003 . The Commission did not investigate.

The former commissioners said they had requested and received files on Able Danger at the Pentagon in 2004 , but found nothing in them about the later assassins. It was not until July 12, 2004, that an Able Danger employee testified without any evidence that Atta discovered the program in mid-2000. Since no other testimony or documents confirmed this, neither his testimony nor the existence of Able Danger were mentioned in the report. In December 2006, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that there was no evidence of any prior knowledge of later assassins.

Torture of witnesses

On August 17, 2004, Democratic MP Ed Markey declared in the House of Representatives that the US practice of extraditing terrorist suspects to third countries such as Syria and Saudi Arabia, where they were then tortured, contravened the Commission's recommendation and the UN Convention against Torture signed by the US . The FBI representative Maureen Baginski, who was questioned about this, replied that the FBI was not allowed to take part in interrogations outside the USA, as they are prohibited within the USA. Other government representatives should be asked about the methods themselves. In 2005, Congress passed a law that stopped waterboarding , sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and stressful positions, which the US government had legalized as "advanced interrogation methods" since 2002 in the war on terrorism and thus attempted to exempt it from the international ban on torture . In 2006 the US Supreme Court ruled that detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base enjoyed the protection of the UN Convention against Torture. At the same time, more cases of terrorist suspects who had been flown to third countries and tortured there became known.

In January 2008, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden announced before the Senate that the CIA had legally interrogated the three Al-Qaeda members Chalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Subaida and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri until early 2003, when they were interrogated for waterboarding and about 30 out of 100 al-Qaeda detainees subjected to other methods such as sleep deprivation. The NBC then reported that 100 interrogation reports from the CIA and 30 follow-up interrogations with its own inquiries had been evaluated for the commission report. 441 of 1700 footnotes in it refer to interrogation under " extended interrogation methods ". The majority of chapters 5 to 7 on planning, forming terrorist cells and the arrival of the perpetrators in the USA are based on this. At least four Al Qaeda witnesses quoted in the report said in spring 2007 that they had only testified so that they would not be further tortured. CIA officials said the 9/11 Commission was not given direct access to the detainees in order not to endanger the interrogators' relationship with the interrogators and the secrecy of the prison locations.

Michael Ratner, who heads the United States' Center for Constitutional Rights , which legally represents the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, was shocked that the commission had never asked about the interrogation methods. That was the first duty of the lawyers involved. If they suspected torture, they should at least have reserved all references to statements that might have been made through torture. Karen Greenberg , director of the Law and Security Center at New York University , saw the report's statements about perpetrators and planners not affected by the interrogations. However, the commission should have based its narrative more on unspoilt sources.

Philip Zelikow stated that the commission staff suspected harsh interrogation methods, distrusted the interrogation reports and therefore sought direct access to the prisoners. Because they did not receive this, they had to apply for another series of interrogations and rely on the CIA reports about it. A considerable part, possibly the largest part, of the information in the report on planning the attacks is based on these. The CIA probably denied direct access to the commission because it did not allow it to see the interrogation methods. The CIA was asked very precisely and repeatedly about the circumstances of the interrogations and the lack of answers, the refusal to allow direct interviews, and doubts about certain prisoner statements were explicitly noted in the report. But no one knew about torture. After they became known, a detailed internal report was drawn up on the commission's attempts to gain direct access to the prisoners and their interrogators. This was The New York Times published. The involvement of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh was proven by their own statements to Al Jazeera before their arrest.

In March 2009, it was announced that the CIA had destroyed 92 interrogation tapes, twelve of which showed harsh interrogation techniques. So, Democrats in Congress called for a bipartisan commission on the legality of the Bush administration's anti-terrorist tactics. Philip Shenon then recalled the “blind spot” of the 9/11 Commission: It had ignored obvious evidence that its description of the attack plan and the Al Qaeda story was based heavily on statements made by inmates who had been tortured or otherwise brutally treated. Despite media reports, she did not publicly protest against this treatment. Instead, she requested another series of interrogations from the CIA. It is quite possible that the Al-Qaeda prisoners were exposed to the harsh interrogation methods or at least threatened with them for this very reason. This seriously undermines the credibility of the Commission's report.

A report by the Senate Armed Services Committee published in April 2009 showed that the "advanced interrogation methods" came from SERE training for US soldiers in the 1950s. They were subjected to torture methods used by their opponents in the Korean War to extort false confessions. In 2002, a US Army psychologist determined the unreliability of statements made by Guantanamo inmates in this way. Senator Carl Levin accused the US government of ordering methods never intended for real interrogation, possibly in order to obtain false statements.

NSA data not evaluated

By June 2004, the commission had disregarded the National Security Agency (NSA) archives at Fort George G. Meade . After a few staff members complained about it, it was rushed to search over a weekend. A possible connection between the Al-Qaida planners and the Iran- backed terrorist organization Hezbollah was found. The final report mentioned the find only briefly and without context; a follow-up investigation has not yet been made and has not yet been requested by any congressman or member of government.

Several former members and witnesses of the commission, including Bob Graham, admitted to Philip Shenon in 2010 that the NSA files had not been properly examined due to lack of time. Since the NSA had already collected over 50 percent of all information collected by the US secret services at that time, one could certainly find still unknown data on al-Qaeda and its attack plan. Al-Qaeda is presumed to have closer ties to foreign state governments and clearer warnings of the attacks than previously known. In this way one could possibly find out whether a Saudi diplomat in Los Angeles , who was demonstrably in contact with al-Hazmi and Mihdhar in San Diego in 2000, supported them in their preparations for the attack.

An NSA spokesman said that in 2004 the 9/11 Commission had been given access to all NSA documents, staff and sources. He left it open as to whether the commission representatives had adequately examined the archive at the time. It is particularly unclear whether the NSA released tapped phone calls from Al-Qaeda members. John R. Schindler, a former NSA analyst, urged Congressmen and others to review the NSA material that the 9/11 Commission had escaped.

In 2013, Kean and Hamilton warned that NSA data collection was out of control and going way too far. There is no real overview of the NSA surveillance programs. Their exposure would not endanger national security; Mass surveillance is not necessary for this. Despite good initial intentions, it is inevitably abused later.

Content deficiencies

Unnamed in charge

The commission had made a conscious decision to avoid blaming Bush and his administration in order to achieve a unanimous, non-partisan report. The family committee and others criticized the fact that the report did not hold any specific individuals responsible for the authorities' failures prior to the attacks and did not call for any personal consequences.

Benjamin DeMott criticized sharply in July 2004: The 9/11 report was deception and fraud. In response to Bush's blatant lie that no one had informed him about terrorist cells that were active in the USA, no one dared to confront him with testimony to the contrary. Bush's claim that the August 6, 2001 PDB was "historic" clearly contradicts its wording. His claim that he had long known al-Qaeda to be a deadly threat was contradicted by his passivity before 9/11. His few actions on the fight against terrorism (a request to Pakistan for support and a press statement that Cheney is head of a task force to examine terrorist threats for the domestic market) were not followed. The commission should have pointed this out and clarified whether Bush had understood that by listening to the warnings of his experts he might have prevented the attacks. The PDB on August 6 alleged 70 ongoing FBI investigations into Al-Qaeda, which the Joint Inquiry had found nothing. The PDB had also clearly spoken of a cell in the USA, mentioning suspicious behavior by terror suspects in New York. Bush's statement that he would have acted if he had known about it should have been countered with the statements of the FBI and CIA experts, who had desperately asked to be dismissed from their posts precisely because of their superiors' passivity towards sleeper cells in the USA.

Commissioners Richard Ben-Veniste and Bob Kerrey gave up their reluctance after Bush's re-election and since 2006 have declared: Despite clear warnings about al-Qaida attacks in the USA, Bush had done nothing at all to increase the security of US citizens. Counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke confirmed this in 2009.

In 2008, longtime New York Times reporter Philip Shenon reported on many conflicts in the Commission in his book The Commission . Most of the staff members have made serious efforts to clear the matter up, but have repeatedly been hindered by political interests. The will to unity had the effect that the report hardly found accountability and avoided value judgments about personal failure as far as possible. The judgments about Clinton, Bush and their advisors were far too mild. Many mishaps and errors in the run-up to the attacks had been concealed, such as the fact that Attorney General Ashcroft did not want to hear any further FBI reports on attack plans in the USA just days before the attacks and later wanted to personally prevent the clarification of his statement. Condoleezza Rice lied under oath to the Commission with its misinterpretation of the PDB of August 6, 2001. The report does not state that George Tenet first denied every meeting with Bush in August 2001, but then had to allow two meetings. Zelikow prevented a comparison of the counter-terrorism efforts of Clinton (who had often warned against al-Qaeda) and Bush (who had only warned in general against state terrorism) to be included in the report. Zelikow also tried to suggest a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda and to intimidate staff members in order to prevent statements detrimental to Bush. - Zelikow denied the allegations with a 131-page statement. He only admitted discussions with no political content with Rice and Rove. Upon completion of the report, he became a consultant to Rice. Shenon's book has been widely recognized for valuable background information.

Delayed issuance of FAA warnings

A staff report by the 9/11 Commission dated August 26, 2004 summarized the security measures the FAA had failed to take prior to September 11, 2001. According to this, US secret services had warned the FAA from April 1 to September 10, 2001 in 52 of 101 daily warning reports of possible attacks by Al-Qaeda and bin Laden on US airlines, including five aircraft hijackings and two suicide attacks, but without these link. The FAA warned US airports in early 2001 that hijackers who refused to exchange hostages for prisoners would be more likely to hijack domestic flights for spectacular suicide bombings. However, it neither tightened airport controls nor increased the number of armed flight attendants nor did it add to its internal list of terror suspects. The head of the FAA security department admitted to the commission that he was unfamiliar with the US government's tip-off list, which also listed two al-Qaida suspects. In 2001, the FAA's Aviation Safety Working Group did not deal with terror warnings, but with reducing delays and costs. The FAA has been "lulled into a false sense of security" in spite of the rapid rise in terror warnings since 1990, the report said.

Only after a media report on the existence of this report did the US government release parts of it in late January 2005. Commissioners and victims' families requested full clearance. Democratic congressmen have criticized Bush for deliberately delaying the release until after his re-election. The journalist Robert Scheer accused the US government of trying to cover up Bush's joint responsibility for September 11 by delaying the release. Out of consideration for the economic interests of the airlines, Bush failed to oblige the FAA to take protective measures such as air marshals . This would not have led to the attacks and the expensive wars that followed in the USA. Scheer was then fired from the Los Angeles Times after almost 30 years of service .

Emergency meeting not mentioned

The journalist Bob Woodward described in 2006 a meeting between CIA director Tenet and the head of the CIA anti-terrorist unit, Cofer Black, with Condoleezza Rice on July 10, 2001. Tenet had requested an immediate telephone call for the first time in order to respond to acute threats against Al-Qaeda To draw attention to the USA itself and to demand immediate countermeasures. Both had the impression that Rice had let them appear and only promised to review the current anti-terrorist plans. Because neither the Joint Inquiry nor the Commission report mentioned the meeting, Black had accused the commissioners of not wanting to know some things. Zelikow knew about the meeting, but Tenet and Black did not know the place, time and type of the feared attacks and did not specify the required immediate action.

A White House spokesman confirmed the meeting, but not the frustration of Tenet and Black about it: the two of them had not reported this to the 9/11 Commission. Jamie Gorelick said the commission staff had never been informed of the meeting or they would most certainly have inquired and included it in the report. Staff member Peter Rundlet confirmed this. It was shocking that the government had ignored such a serious alarm call from the two best-informed terrorist experts. Rice, Tenet and Black would not have described the meeting in either private or public surveys, although it was of central relevance to the investigation. That all three could have forgotten the appointment is unthinkable. The CIA and White House documents should also have referred to it. Even if only one person had forgotten the appointment, it should have appeared in writing somewhere. It is therefore likely that the meeting should be deliberately covered up ( cover up ).

Tenet contradicted this in his 2007 memoir. He reportedly reported the meeting to the Commission in a closed session. Why it is missing in their report is inexplicable to him. Senate minutes confirmed that Tenet had alerted a group of senators as well as Rice on July 12, 2001. According to Tenet, CIA officers in charge of Alec Station Richard Blee and Richard Clarke were also there on July 10th. Blee warned Rice that the evidence pointed to “spectacular”, multiple, simultaneous attacks with as many deaths as possible, possibly in the USA itself. Bin Laden's threat with this is known to his supporters in the Middle East and not a bluff, as he would otherwise gain popularity and donations there would lose. The US should use the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan for proactive countermeasures.

Unsettled non-disclosure of data

According to George Tenet's testimony before the Joint Inquiry , the CIA monitored an al-Qaida meeting in Kuala Lumpur at the beginning of January 2000 and identified Khalid al Mihdhar's name and entry visa, which was valid until April 6, 2000, from a passport copy. In order to continue surveillance, she only informed the FBI, not the State Department, which could have banned entry and visa renewals. In Bangkok, the CIA lost track of Mihdhar. In August 2001, she learned that he and Nawaf al Hazmi had entered the United States on January 15, 2000, left on June 10, 2000 and re-entered on July 4, 2001. On August 23, 2001 she arranged to put the two people on the watchlist .

The commission report supplemented this process: In March 2000, the Counterterrorism Center also learned of Hazmi's entry into the USA on January 15, 2000, but kept this information to itself. According to a footnote, an FBI agent attempted to report Mihdhar's immigration and visa information to FBI headquarters in August 2001. A CIA officer forbade him to do so, but a few hours later told her CIA colleagues that Mihdhar's data had been reported to the FBI. She admitted that she did not pass on the information herself, but could not name anyone who did it. Nobody else witnessed the transfer. Documents at that time (including the report of the General Inspector of July 2, 2004) contradict the information. It remained open whether the CIA was monitoring Hazmi and Mihdhar in the USA or why they had not reported their stay for 18 months.

For the Jersey Girls , the CIA's knowledge of the entry of the two Al Qaeda members and its intentional non-disclosure proves that certain people and omissions made the attacks possible. It is unacceptable that the report did not clear up the process, that it did not identify and name those responsible for withholding this information.

In October 2009 Richard Clarke stated in an interview: To the best of his knowledge, 50 CIA employees knew about Hazmi's and Mihdhar's entry. Such information was always sent to him automatically with the daily warning reports, but this was not the case. George Tenet also informed him about every minute detail about Al-Qaida. Neither at the emergency meeting on July 10, 2001 nor at the cabinet meeting on September 4, 2001, Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee had mentioned the entry of the two al-Qaeda members, although this fact would have been an excellent justification for the required emergency measures on al-Qaeda. Otherwise he, Clarke, would have asked why he hadn't heard about it. With this information, he could have immediately launched a nationwide public search for the two, who would have tracked them and their contacts on the basis of their credit cards and hotel bookings in 24 hours and thus prevented the attacks. He therefore believes that senior CIA officials, probably Tenet himself, ordered the non-disclosure of this information. Tenet also incompletely informed the 9/11 Commission about it. He, Clarke, could only explain this by the fact that the CIA wanted to recruit these people as agents and cover it up. Clarke admitted that she couldn't prove it. The interview didn't air until early August 2011 after Clarke confirmed his statements to editors.

Tenet, Black and Blee denied Clarke's allegations in a joint statement: No information was deliberately withheld from him and no attempt was made to recruit Hazmi and Mihdhar as agents. Their statements before the commission were complete and their report correctly concluded that the leaders of the CIA and FBI were unaware of Hazmi and Mihdhar's stay in the United States. Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern said the denial was implausible. He recalled Tenet's false testimony under oath to the 9/11 Commission that he had not visited Bush for the whole of August 2001. In the trial against Moussaoui it was also found that Tenet had been informed about Moussaoui's flight training on August 23, 2001 (one day before another meeting with Bush). What he told Bush about it should be clarified.

Unclear role of Saudi Arabia

Bandar ibn Sultan with George W. Bush (left) in August 2002

As of September 11, 2001, the US authorities arrested many foreigners in the USA and checked their residence permits. As of September 14, 2001, Saudi Arabia's government received exit permits and special flights for its citizens, including 24 members of Osama bin Laden. The FBI previously checked their passports and visas, interviewed some Saudis willing to leave the country and found that none of them had been involved in the attacks. The 9/11 commission report confirmed this finding, stating that the U.S. government approved and coordinated the outbound flights but did not limit the FBI investigation based on evidence. The report referred to six charter flights for a total of 142 Saudi citizens. According to Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 (premiered on May 17, 2004), on September 13, 2001, while the general flight ban was still in effect, three terrorist Saudis and an FBI companion had been on a private flight. Shortly before, Bush had met the Saudi ambassador, Bandar ibn Sultan . The US government denied this flight, but the airline admitted it in June 2004.

The Joint Inquiry had started investigating possible Saudi financial aid to al-Qaeda. According to their report, neither the CIA nor the FBI “were able to make a final assessment of the extent to which there was support for terrorist activities (by Saudi government agencies) globally or in the US, and if there was such support, whether it was intentional or innocent in nature ”. On Bush's orders, the chapter of the report on the results remained under lock and key, because according to Bush, its release would have endangered sources and methods in the war on terrorism. The report appeared in 2002 with 28 blank pages to show the extent of the censorship. Since then, the chairmen of the Joint Inquiry Richard Shelby and Bob Graham have asked for their clearance and for a thorough investigation of possible contributions from Saudi Arabia to the attacks.

The author of the 28 pages Michael Jacobson and the lawyer Dana Lesemann were allowed to follow up on possible state sponsors of the attacks in the 9/11 commission with their security clearance. Nevertheless, the chairman of the staff, Philip Zelikow Lesemann, banned the requested copy of the 28 pages and the questioning of suspected Saudis. When she obtained a copy within the limits of her authority, he dismissed her without informing the staff.

The commission found no evidence of financial aid from Saudi government officials to al-Qaeda. However, it did not rule out contributions from unknown Saudi private donors: Donations also for religious extremists are common in Saudi Arabia and so far have hardly been officially controlled. The entire attack planning cost US $ 400 to 500,000; some sources of money are unclear. She exonerated Bandar's wife Haifa al Faisal . This had transferred around 130,000 US dollars to the wives of the Saudi agents Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Bassnan, who were friends with the future hijackers Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. The 9/11 report ruled out that the transfers were intended for the kidnappers. Many staff members expressed their dissent on these statements in footnotes. Jacobson occupied a support cell in Los Angeles around the Saudi imam Fahad al-Thumairy and refuted his claim that he had never known or met Hazmi and Mihdhar through his phone calls with Bayoumi and his chauffeur's trips with the kidnappers.

Bob Graham described the findings in his book Intelligence Matters (2004): Prominent Saudi government and intelligence officials were directly involved in the events leading up to the attacks. Ambassador Bandar helped finance this. The US authorities have systematically covered this up. Due to new evidence, Graham has been demanding that suspected Saudi diplomats be lifted since 2012.

In 2013, Congressmen Walter B. Jones and Stephen Lynch were allowed to view the 28 pages but were not allowed to disclose their contents. However, press reports pointed to CIA documents that high-ranking Saudi diplomats and intelligence officers helped some assassins in the US:

  • The consulate officer Fahad al-Thumairy is said to have formed a team with Bayoumi that Mihdhar and Hazmi received there in January 2000.
  • Bayoumi is said to have arranged for them with Bassnan in San Diego apartments, rents, telephones and private contacts to the preacher Anwar al-Awlaki .
  • As the new imam of a mosque in Washington DC with close contacts to the Saudi embassy, ​​he is said to have found hotel rooms and ID cards for some later kidnappers in the summer of 2001.
  • The money transferred by the Saudi ambassador and his wife for Bassnan's sick wife is said to have ended up in the hands of the kidnappers.
  • In Sarasota, Florida, Atta and other assassins visited Esam Ghazzawi, an adviser to King Fahd ibn Abd al-Aziz's nephew . Two weeks before the attacks, he left his house with furniture and cars behind.
  • On the eve of the attacks, the Saudi government official Saleh Hussayen moved to the same hotel where three bombers stayed. The presumed meeting could not be proven; the Commission report does not mention the incident.
  • When Awlaki left the United States in 2002, an arrest warrant for him was temporarily overturned. When in 2004 other members of the Saudi embassy were suspected of terrorism and aiding and abetting of al-Qaeda, Saudi Arabia withdrew Ambassador Bandar. FBI agents assigned to the cases said the White House had repeatedly prevented them from following any leads to the embassy. Graham was not given access to the files on the Sarasota incident.

Because of this, Jones, Lynch and Graham called for a Congressional resolution to approve the entire Joint Inquiry report . In December 2013, a congressional resolution called on US President Barack Obama for full clearance. The FBI's 9/11 Review Commission , set up in 2014, confirmed the results of the 2004 9/11 report in March 2015, ignoring the evidence of Saudi involvement and contacting Graham.

Since March 2004, more than 500 victims' relatives had sued Saudi officials for damages. They were allowed to choose US government lawyers as their defense lawyers. Zacarias Moussaoui , imprisoned in the USA, testified as a witness in this civil law suit that he had kept a list of Saudi donors for Al-Qaida on behalf of Osama bin Laden. High-ranking members of the government and members of the Saud dynasty such as Turki ibn Faisal and Bandar ibn Sultan would have stood on it. He, Moussaoui, and a representative of the Saudi embassy in the USA were also considering an attack on the presidential aircraft, Air Force One . Moussaoui's statement was made public on February 5, 2015. The following day, the White House promised to look into the release of the 28 pages.

In June 2015, Senator Rand Paul introduced a bill to the US Senate, which was rejected there. In the same year, a federal judge ruled that Saudi Arabia enjoyed immunity from claims for damages. Victim attorneys attributed this to the secrecy of the 28 pages in which they suspected evidence of the Saudi government's involvement in the attacks. In January 2016, the Senate Judiciary Committee supported a bipartisan bill to lift the immunity of state governments that hold US courts responsible for terrorist attacks against US citizens on American soil. Saudi Arabia threatened to sell US $ 750 billion worth of US securities if the law went into effect.

In April 2016, US President Obama wanted to visit Saudi Arabia. Previously, Graham and some former members of the 9/11 Commission urged him again to release the 28 pages. According to Graham, the Bayoumi named in it was included in FBI files as a Saudi secret agent even before the attacks . Saudi government officials, wealthy Saudis and charities have "substantially supported" 9/11 perpetrators in the US. Former FBI agent John Guandolo confirmed that ex-ambassador Bandar had financed at least two 9/11 assassins through a straw man. Bandar and other Saudi eminences should be classified as terrorist suspects.

Most of the 28 pages were released on July 14, 2016 and published on the Internet. The US government insisted that there was no evidence of Saudi Arabia's involvement in the attacks. Members of the Joint Inquiry emphasized that the material does not allow definitive conclusions, but offers traces to be followed up. Media reports, on the other hand, confirmed that supporters of some assassins with contacts to the government of Saudi Arabia were now proven.

In September 2016, the House of Representatives passed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), which allows the immunity of states suspected of terrorism to be lifted. The Senate overruled Obama's veto against it. At the same time, many senators signed a letter from John McCain and Lindsey Graham , which warned of the unintended consequences of the law for national security and suggested amendments to defuse the situation. Saudi lobby groups bribed veterans' associations by giving their members free trips to Washington DC to campaign against the law there. But with the release of the 28 pages, the victim's lawyers were able to investigate the clues contained therein and include them in the indictment. How they discovered:

  • Between February and May 1999, Bassnan had cashed checks for a total of US $ 74,000; two more checks came from Ambassador Bandar. The FBI had suspected since 2002 that these sums came from the Princess Haifa Foundation and were intended for medical expenses, but were used for the assassins Hazmi and Mihdhar.
  • When the FBI questioned Saudi official Saleh al-Hussayen about his overnight stay in the same hotel as three assassins, he had faked a seizure and then fled the hospital and the United States.
  • The Saudi agent Mohammed al-Qudhaeein had been looking for ways to get into the cockpit of an American Airlines plane before 9/11.
  • An al-Qaida bomber's flight license was in an envelope from the Saudi embassy.
  • The Somali Omar Abdi Mohamed collected donations as a spy for the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs in San Diego. From December 1998 to May 2001 he had sent a total of more than 370,000 US dollars from a branch of the Global Relief organization in Chicago to the Western Somali Relief Agency , which transferred it to the Dahabshiil transfer company in Karachi, Pakistan. This company was founded by Al-Qaeda’s contact Mohammed Sulaymon Barre shortly after the terrorist attacks on US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi . Barre is still imprisoned in Guantanamo; the US government has not yet released his interrogation results.
  • Omar's Saudi boss Khaleid Sowailem headed the Da'Wah mission organization, which was suspected of terror aid, and was employed at the Saudi embassy in Washington DC. Agent Bayoumi telephoned him directly about 30 times in 2001 while looking after Hazmi and Mihdhar in San Diego.

Victims' attorney Jim Kreindler believes that Omar transfers were made on behalf of the Saudi embassy and financed the attacks by going through Barre to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Karachi, who then had large amounts of cash delivered to the attackers by courier. Since March 2017, Kreindler has been suing Saudi Arabia for 10 million US dollars for each dead family member of his now 850 clients.

By October 2017, the victim's lawyers merged their lawsuits against Saudi Arabia. Their joint indictment shows that the Saudi royal dynasty had sponsored the extreme Wahhabis with large sums of money for decades and had supported charities such as the Islamic World League and the International Islamic Relief Organization also Al-Qaeda. Because these organizations declared themselves to be Saudi state organs, they fell under the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act in the USA and thus so far avoided prosecution. In March 2018, a federal court in New York allowed the victims' families to be charged.

Since then, further indications of the prosecution have become known:

  • According to their own statements, Saudi intelligence officers had known the al-Qaeda membership of the later 9/11 bombers since their arrival in the USA. They contradicted the statements of their government that the Saudi embassy had helped all Saudi citizens.
  • Fahad al-Thumairy, the former consulate officer and imam of a mosque in California visited by the bombers, has been working in Riyadh for the Saudi government since his expulsion from the USA in 2003 .
  • The FBI agent Steven Moore, who led the investigation into the attack on the Pentagon, contradicts the 9/11 commission: They do have evidence of Saudi aid to assassins, including that of Thumairy and Bayoumi for Hazmi and Mihdhar. Thumairy was never questioned directly by the FBI.

The FBI has been holding back files on Thumairy and Bayoumi so far. A release by US President Donald Trump is unlikely because of his support for the Saudi royal dynasty. In their book The Watchdogs Didn't Bark , published in 2018, John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski described the recent evidence of Saudi complicity and the continuous cover-up attempts by US authorities.

Pakistan's unresolved contribution

According to The Times of India , the British Islamist Ahmad Omar Sheikh reportedly transferred US $ 100,000 to the later assassin, Mohammed Atta, before the attacks. Mahmoud Ahmad , then head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) secret service in Pakistan, is said to have ordered the transfer. The general is said to have taken early retirement in October 2001 under pressure from the US government. The information came from unnamed government agencies in India . Some Western media picked up the report unchecked and missed a charge against Mahmoud. Later reports of the alleged fundraiser's arrest named him Mustapha Ahmed al-Hawsawi and did not mention ISI involvement. The Times Of India did not mention ISI later either.

The FBI told the 9/11 Commission that it had found no evidence of payments from the ISI to the assassins. Investigative journalists Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan consider the first reports to be propaganda by the Indian government, which had long accused arch rivals Pakistan of participating in terrorism. But they also point to bin Laden's longstanding relationship with Pakistan's ISI, which supported and covered al-Qaeda and the Taliban until September 11th.

Unexplained warnings

In February 2004, former FBI agent Behrooz Sarshar , an interpreter for Farsi , testified before the Justice Department inspector general, the Senate Judiciary Committee, and three staff members on the 9/11 Commission. He had translated information for two FBI agents in Washington DC from an Iranian agent who had contacts with Al-Qaeda's inner leadership in Afghanistan and was considered very reliable. In April 2001, the agent reported that Al-Qaeda was planning to attack planes and suicide bombers against New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Some of the perpetrators are already in the USA and are training to be pilots. The attacks would take place in the next few months. The Iranian agent asked several times whether his information had been passed on and something had been done about it. FBI superior Thomas Frields recorded the statement; it is unclear whether she was telegraphed to FBI headquarters as usual. Frields and then FBI director Dale Watson made no comments on the matter . FBI experts doubted Sarshar's statement because the FBI had previously wanted to fire him for unknown reasons and he had then resigned himself.

Sibel Edmonds , a translator employed by the FBI after the attacks , had the commission question Sarshar. She and Kristen Breitweiser, one of the Jersey Girls , were present when he testified . For her part, Edmonds testified that many terrorist reports were incorrectly translated in the FBI because the translators were incompetent or anti-American. Senior FBI officials confirmed some of their allegations; others pointed out that following an internal complaint against one of her colleagues, she had been fired by the FBI for unclear reasons and had been suing for severance pay. The statements of Sarshar and Edmonds are missing in the report of the commission. She then founded the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition in August 2004 and has since emerged as a sharp critic of the 9/11 Commission.

In 2011, the US government released the staff minutes of Sarshar's testimony, but obscured the content. Only the quoted heading “Kamikaze Pilots” indicates possible suicide attacks with airplanes. The Jersey Girls demanded 31 January 2011 immediate awareness of the consequences of Sarshars statement of 2004 on the grounds of censorship and abolishing it. Because the previous commission chairmen did not respond, Sibel Edmonds published a text on February 2, 2011 , which she said reproduced Sarshar's testimony before the Inspector General, Senate Legal Affairs Committee and Senator Patrick Leahy , where she was present.

Summarized criticism

In 2011, investigative journalists Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan confirmed the main finding of the 9/11 commission: considerable chaos in the air traffic control authorities, the disregard of numerous advance warnings by the government and failure to divulge information between security services had made the attacks possible. They rejected some conspiracy theses as unfounded, including: The attacks were a false flag action ; the Bush administration knowingly approved or actively participated in them; the WTC buildings were actually blown up. But they also summarized the shortcomings in the report that had been criticized again and again since 2004:

  • He did not investigate why the CIA had not passed on its knowledge of the entry of two al-Qaida members to the United States to the FBI since March 2000.
  • He did not reveal the financial connections of the hijackers to Saudi Arabia. The relevant chapter was kept secret under President Bush without adequate justification and, despite the promised release, had not been published by then, even under Barack Obama.
  • He had not passed on an internal request by Philip Zelikow to the commission heads on how to deal with false statements by witnesses from the US Air Force , the FAA and NORAD. The request only became known in 2009. Important statements by the FAA, which made the extent of their failure clear, were not mentioned.
  • He did not mention the FBI finding a four-page document (" Spiritual Instructions ") in Mohammed Atta's luggage and in a Nawaf al-Hazmi car at Washington Dulles International Airport .
  • He did not mention the statement by Able Danger employees that the Pentagon had banned certain witnesses from testifying before the 9/11 Commission and that documents about it had been destroyed.
  • He did not mention that the DIA had withheld from the FBI its knowledge of the year 2000 about four later hijackers.
  • The commission did not question Al Jazeera editor Yosri Fouda without explanation, although award-winning journalists such as Peter Bergen and Ron Suskind had rated Fouda's interview with the planners of the attacks as credible. The statements of the Al-Qaida planners from CIA interrogations, reproduced in the report of the commission, largely agreed with the statements reported by Fouda.

These and other omissions in the report would have to be resolved without conspiracy theories.

The publicist Paul Craig Roberts came to a similarly critical résumé in 2011:

  • Several commissioners, including Kean, Hamilton, John Farmer and Max Cleland, have distanced themselves from some points in the commission's report since 2004.
  • They testified that the Bush administration obstructed the investigation and deliberately withheld information from the commission.
  • Representatives of the Pentagon, the FAA and NORAD lied to the commission so badly that the commission considered having their false statements investigated as obstruction by the judiciary.

For his part, Roberts added:

  • The 9/11 report did not answer most of the questions asked by the victims' relatives.
  • The commission did not summon important witnesses and only heard witnesses who confirmed the government's point of view in order to cover up the actual events politically in a controlled manner.
  • It was composed of former politicians, well-known experts were not appointed to it.

Consequences

Reorganization of security policy

The establishment of the Department of Homeland Security ( " DHS ") in November 2002 met the most important recommendation of the Commission. In 2011 it reported on its progress in implementing further recommendations of the 9/11 Commission.

Unlike previous comparable national catastrophe investigations, the US public initially widely perceived the 9/11 Commission's findings as authoritative, legitimate, and fair. Victim families and the commissioners used the report effectively to push through a package of political reforms. Nevertheless, the report was not considered the conclusion, but the start of a comprehensive review of September 11th, stimulated by its wealth of information and probable further discoveries.

The family committee campaigned for the implementation of the required structural consequences and kept a public list of names of the congress members who delayed this implementation. After the Commission's recommendations were implemented by law in December 2004, it was dissolved.

Delegitimation of the Iraq war

In November 2005, the Senate Intelligence Committee found out that the DIA al-Libis had internally classified the statements mentioned in the report as "deliberately misleading" as early as February 2002 because he could not provide details about the alleged training in Iraq and apparently only expectations of his interrogators wanted to meet. Nevertheless, Bush (from October 2002) and Secretary of State Colin Powell (on February 5, 2003 before the UN Security Council ) justified the Iraq war with al-Libi's alleged confession. A report by the Senate committee on the use of intelligence for the Iraq war found in June 2008 that al-Libi had given false testimony about the threat of torture. Nevertheless, the secret services would have supported false statements by the government by passing on such statements.

In April 2009, a former Senate Intelligence officer testified before the Senate Committee that Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had ordered the "advanced interrogation methods" from August 2002 without any legal basis, including because they were uncompromising evidence of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda wanted to have. Powell's chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, also confirmed this in the case of al-Libis.

In 2009, the historian Kathryn S. Olmsted emphasized the historical significance of the 9/11 Commission: In the case of national disasters, the presidents regularly commissioned selected respected statesmen to investigate their causes, for example with the commission of inquiry into the attack on Pearl Harbor (1942), the Warren Commission (1963) and the Rockefeller Commission (1975). These should always have avoided a non-governmental clarification of the topic in Congress and should have confronted conspiracy theories circulating in public . Unlike these predecessors, however, the 9/11 Commission was formed as a result of pressure from victims' families against the will of the President. With Richard Clarke, she gave a stage for the first time to a respected, hardly vulnerable government counter-terrorism expert. His testimony encouraged other insiders to refute the government's conspiracy theory that the dictator of Iraq supported al-Qaeda against the United States. Since then, fewer and fewer US citizens have believed this claim. The gradual departure from the Iraq war is thus a success of the 9/11 Commission.

9/11 Truth Movement

Bush's blockade of the commission and his attempt to withhold relevant documents from it generated considerable suspicion. Because the Bush administration had initially denied every warning, then warnings of aircraft hijackings, then warnings of aircraft attacks in the USA, the PDB of August 6, 2001 had a debunking effect. Now more and more US citizens believed that Bush was not just trying to hide incompetence, but also specific prior knowledge of the attacks.

Representatives of the 9/11 Truth Movement go further and deduce a secret government participation through criminal passive permitting or even active bringing about the attacks. They reject the Commission's report as a whole and portray it as deliberately misleading the public. They often claim that the report failed to address the causes of the WTC buildings collapsing in order to cover up other, “real” causes of 9/11. He doesn't even mention the then collapsed WTC 7 . The commission “decided” not to even discuss this collapse. Because she knew that WTC 7 had been deliberately blown up, as a witness told her of explosion noises inside the building. This could only have been caused by government officials, as only they could have entered the building on September 11th. In order to cover up this government participation , WTC 7 was not discussed. It was "left" to NIST to "conjure up" a collapse theory. However, the Commission's investigation mandate did not include the consequential damage caused by the attacks. Your report referred to the preliminary investigations carried out by NIST on the WTC buildings at the time and also mentions 7 WTC a few times.

Some authors cite criticism by commissioners and investigative journalists of errors, contradictions, unanswered questions or missing details in the commission's report, but draw different conclusions from them. Mark H. Gaffney concluded from the false claims by Tenet and others uncovered by Shenon that the CIA cannot be trusted in principle. The 9/11 Commission had not achieved its legal goal of clearing up the causes of the events as completely as possible. The same power interests, which Shenon said it failed, would prevent a new, independent investigation such as the "Truth Movement" calls for today. Peter Dale Scott acknowledged that the report provided "a useful and accurate summary of events in many areas." This recognition allows the 9/11 Truth Movement to use other allegedly misleading parts of the report "as evidence of what was suppressed."

On September 11, 2001, NORAD carried out three maneuvers that simulated an external military attack on the USA. One of these took place in the northeast sector of the US and reduced the number of fighter jets available to intercept hijacked aircraft. Authors of the 9/11 Truth Movement attach considerable importance to these maneuvers and assume that they should have covered up the attacks or deliberately prevented the military from responding in good time. The Commission report, on the other hand, only mentioned the Vigilant Guardian maneuver in a footnote: it delayed the reaction to the news of real kidnappings at most by seconds. At the same time, more staff members at NORAD and the Northeast Sector were present for this reason. The tape recordings of NORAD and NEADS communication with the FAA on September 11, 2001 were published in 2006. According to media reports, they confirm the presentation of the 9/11 Commission, but also show that NORAD witnesses questioned by them tried to cover up their violations of the procedural protocols and to gloss over their reactions by giving incorrect times.

swell

  • The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. Authorized Edition. WW Norton, New York 2011, ISBN 978-0-393-32671-0 ( book excerpt online )
  • Thomas H. Kean, Lee H. Hamilton: The 9/11 Report: The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. With reporting and analysis by The New York Times. St. Martin, 2010, ISBN 978-0-312-93554-2 ( online excerpt )
  • Ernest R. May: The 9/11 Commission Report with Related Documents. Bedford / St. Martin's, 2010, ISBN 978-0-312-59119-9 .
  • James R. Holbein: The 9/11 Commission: Proceedings and Analysis, Volumes 1-3. Oceana Publications, 2005, ISBN 0-379-21529-2 .
  • Steven Strasser, Craig R. Whitney (Eds.): The 9/11 Investigations: Staff Reports of the 9/11 Commission: Excerpts from the House-Senate Joint Inquiry Report on 9/11: Testimony from Fourteen Key Witnesses, Including Richard Clarke , George Tenet, and Condoleezza Rice. PublicAffairs, 2004, ISBN 1-58648-279-3 .

literature

To the commission
  • Philip Shenon: The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation. (2008) Little Brown Book Group, London 2011, ISBN 978-0-446-58075-5 .
  • Stuart Farson, Mark Phythian: Commissions of Inquiry and National Security: Comparative Approaches. Praeger Frederick, 2010, ISBN 978-0-313-38468-4 .
  • Richard Ben-Veniste: The 9/11 Commission. In: The Emperor's New Clothes: Exposing the Truth from Watergate to 9/11. Thomas Dunne, 2010, ISBN 978-0-312-35796-2 , pp. 197-324.
  • John Iseby (Ed.): 9/11 Commission Recommendations. Nova Science, 2008, ISBN 978-1-60456-520-1 .
  • Thomas Kean, Lee H. Hamilton: Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission. Alfred A. Knopf, 2007, ISBN 978-0-307-26377-3 .
  • James Ridgeway: The 5 Unanswered Questions about 9/11: What the 9/11 Commission Report Failed to Tell Us. Seven Stories Press, New York 2005, ISBN 1-58322-712-1 .
  • Ernest R. May, Philip D. Zelikow: Sins of Commission? Falkenrath and His Critics. In: International Security, Volume 29, No. 4 (Spring 2005), pp. 208-211 ( online excerpt ).
  • Richard A. Falkenrath: The 9/11 Commission Report: A Review Essay. In: International Security, Volume 29, No. 3 (Winter 2004/2005), pp. 170–190 ( online excerpt ).
To the historical context
  • David Jenkins, Amanda Jacobsen, Anders Henriksen: The Long Decade: How 9/11 Changed the Law. Oxford University Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-936832-7 .
  • Stephen E. Atkins: The 9/11 Encyclopedia. 2nd Edition. ABC-Clio, 2011, ISBN 978-1-59884-921-9 .
  • Anthony Summers, Robbyn Swan: The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden. Random House, 2011, ISBN 978-0-345-53125-4 .
  • Kathryn S. Olmsted: Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11. Oxford University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-19-975395-6 .
  • John Farmer: The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11. Riverhead, 2009.
  • Amy B. Zegart: Spying Blind. The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11. Princeton University Press, 2007.
  • Government Publications: Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007. Conference Report to Accompany HR 1. Agency Publisher: House, Committee on Conference, 2007, ISBN 978-0-16-079068-3 .
  • Kristen Breitweiser: Wake-Up Call: The Political Education of a 9/11 Widow. Grand Central Publishing, 2006, ISBN 0-446-57932-7 .
  • Richard A. Posner: Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11. Rowman & Littlefield, 2005, ISBN 0-7425-4947-X .
  • Richard Clarke: Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror. Free Press, 2004, ISBN 0-7432-6823-7 .
  • Paul Thompson: The Terror Timeline: Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute: A Comprehensive Chronicle of the Road to 9/11 - and America's Response. HarperCollins, 2004, ISBN 0-06-078338-9 .
  • Gerald Posner : Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11. Random House, 2003, ISBN 0-375-50879-1 .
To the 9/11 Truth Movement
art

Web links

swell
criticism

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Associated Press, March 5, 2002: FBI alerted to potential suicide hijackings in 1995 ; Stephen E. Atkins: The 9/11 Encyclopedia. 2011, p. 314.
  2. ^ Maria Ressa (CNN, July 26, 2003): Philippines: US missed 9/11 clues years ago
  3. ^ Philip Shenon (New York Times, May 17, 2002): Traces of Terrorism: The Warnings; FBI Knew for Years About Terror Pilot Training
  4. ^ Matthew L. Wald (New York Times, October 3, 2001): Earlier Hijackings Offered Signals That Were Missed
  5. ↑ CNN, July 18, 2001: Genoa braces for G8 summit
  6. ↑ Los Angeles Times, September 27, 2001: Italy Tells of Threat at Genoa Summit
  7. ^ William Safire (New York Times, May 20, 2002): The Williams Memo.
  8. ↑ David Kohn (CBS, May 8, 2002): Could It Have Been Stopped? The 20th Hijacker ; Brian Blomquist (New York Post, May 9, 2002): FBI Man's Chilling 9/11 'Prediction'
  9. ^ A b David Johnston, James Risen (New York Times, May 17, 2002): Traces of Terrorism: The intelligence Reports; Series of Warnings
  10. ^ A b Bob Kemper: Rubble: How the 9/11 Families Rebuilt Their Lives and Inspired America. Transatlantic Publishers, 2011, ISBN 978-1-61234-109-5 , p. 112.
  11. ↑ Stephen E. Atkins: Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. In: The 9/11 Encyclopedia. 2011, p. 388 f.
  12. ↑ Stephen E. Atkins: National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. In: The 9/11 Encyclopedia. 2011, p. 315.
  13. ^ A b David E. Sanger (New York Times, May 16, 2002): Bush Was Warned bin Laden Wanted to Hijack Planes
  14. ^ Bob Woodward, Dan Eggen (Washington Post, May 18, 2002): Aug. Memo Focused On Attacks in US - Lack of Fresh Information Frustrated Bush
  15. ^ Kathryn S. Olmsted: Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11. 2009, p. 11
  16. ↑ David Firestone: White House Gives Way On a Sept. 11 Commission; Congress Is Set to Create It. In: New York Times. November 15, 2002; Kean / Hamilton (Eds.): The 9/11 Report. 2010, p. IX
  17. ↑ Stephen E. Atkins: Families of Victims of September 11. In: The 9/11 Encyclopedia. 2011, p. 163.
  18. ^ David Firestone: Kissinger Pulls Out as Chief Of Inquiry Into 9/11 Attacks. In: New York Times. November 15, 2002; Kean / Hamilton: The 9/11 Report. 2010, p. XI f.
  19. ↑ a b Stephen E. Atkins: The 9/11 Encyclopedia. 2011, p. 318.
  20. ↑ Short biographies of the employees of the 9/11 Commission
  21. ↑ Stephen E. Atkins: Jersey Girls. In: The 9/11 Encyclopedia. 2011, p. 260.
  22. ↑ a b Stephen E. Atkins: National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. In: The 9/11 Encyclopedia. 2011, p. 316.
  23. ↑ Philip Shenon (New York Times, January 28, 2003): 9/11 Committee Members Establish Rules On Financial Disclosures and Recusals ; Kean / Hamilton (Eds.): The 9/11 Report. 2010, p. XIV
  24. ↑ a b Kean / Hamilton (eds.): The 9/11 Report. 2010, p. CXXV (preface)
  25. ↑ James R. Holbein (Ed.): The 9/11 Commission: Proceedings and Analysis, Volume 2. Oceana Publications, ISBN 0-379-21527-6 , pp. 25, 40, 132, etc. (FEMA); P. 11, P. 70–83 (NIST)
  26. ↑ a b c Stephen E. Atkins: National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. In: The 9/11 Encyclopedia. 2011, p. 317.
  27. ^ Philip Shenon (New York Times, July 9, 2003): 9/11 Commission Says US Agencies Slow Its Inquiry ; Kean / Hamilton (Eds.): The 9/11 Report. 2010, p. XV f.
  28. ↑ Philip Shenon (New York Times, October 16, 2003): Commission on 9/11 Attacks Issues Subpoena to the FAA
  29. ^ Philip Shenon (New York Times, October 26, 2003): 9/11 Commission could Subpoena Oval Office Files ; Philip Shenon (New York Times, October 27, 2003): Bush Won't Commit to Giving Classified Reports to 9/11 Panel ; Philip Shenon (New York Times, November 13, 2003): Panel Reaches Deal on Access to 9/11 Papers ; Kean / Hamilton (Eds.): The 9/11 Report. 2010, pp. XVI-XVIII
  30. ↑ Reuters (November 20, 2003): 9/11 Commission to Order New York City to Submit Documents
  31. ↑ Philip Shenon (New York Times, December 5, 2003): Ex-Senator Will Soon Quit 9/11 Panel, Leaving Gap for Victims' Advocates
  32. ↑ Philip Shenon (New York Times, February 5, 2004): Bush, in Reversal, Supports More Time for 9/11 Inquiry ; Kean / Hamilton (Eds.): The 9/11 Report. 2010, p. XIX
  33. ^ A b Philip Shenon, Elisabeth Bumiller (New York Times, March 31, 2004): Bush Allows Rice to Testify on 9/11 in a Public Session ; Kean / Hamilton (Eds.): The 9/11 Report. 2010, p. XX ff.
  34. ↑ Public hearings of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
  35. ↑ Sheryl Gay Stolberg (New York Times, April 1, 2004): 9/11 Widows Skillfully Applied The Power of a Question: Why?
  36. ↑ Stephen E. Atkins: The 9/11 Encyclopedia. 2011, pp. 114-116 and p. 553 .; Richard A. Posner: Preventing Surprise Attacks. P. 24.
  37. ↑ Sidney Blumenthal (The Guardian, March 25, 2004): Bush's brand new enemy is the truth.
  38. ^ PBS Newshour, March 22, 2004: War on Terror: Richard Clarke ; Richard Clarke: Against All Enemies. 2004, pp. 227-230.
  39. ↑ Stephen E. Atkins: The 9/11 Encyclopedia. 2011, p. 114 ; Richard Clarke before the 9/11 Commission (C-Span, March 24, 2004)
  40. ↑ FoxNews, March 24, 2004: Transcript: Clarke Praises Bush Team in '02
  41. ^ Dana Milbank, Dan Eggen (Washington Post, April 1, 2004): Bush Counsel Called 9/11 Panelist Before Clarke Testified
  42. ↑ 9/11 Commission: Eighth Public Hearing (March 24, 2004)
  43. ^ Alasdair Roberts: Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age. Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 75.
  44. ↑ a b 9/11 Commission: Ninth Public Hearing (April 8, 2004; original transcript)
  45. ^ Center of American Progress, April 8, 2004: Statement of John Podesta.
  46. ↑ PDB, August 6, 2001: Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US. Declassified and Approved for Release, April 10, 2004 (PDF)
  47. ↑ Center for American Progress: Claim vs. Fact: Condoleezza Rice's Opening Statement (April 8, 2004)
  48. ^ Philip Shenon: The Commission. London 2011, p. 156.
  49. ^ Philip Shenon: The Commission. London 2011, pp. 127 and 155
  50. ↑ Richard Clarke: Against all Enemies. 2004, p. 63.
  51. ↑ ABC News, March 22, 2004: Interview: Former Counterterrorism Aide
  52. ^ A b c Ernest May (New epublic, May 23, 2005): When Government Writes History: The 9-11 Commission Report
  53. ↑ Media Advisory, August 20, 2004: 9/11 Commission to Close, Transfer Records to National Archive (PDF)
  54. ^ Archives of the 9/11 hearings
  55. ^ Table of contents of the commission report
  56. ↑ Jason Burke, Paul Harris (The Guardian, June 20, 2004): 9/11: At last, the full story has been told
  57. ↑ a b c d The 9/11 Commission Report: Executive Summary.
  58. ↑ 9/11 Commission Report, Part 8: “The System was blinking red”
  59. ↑ Jonathan Hafetz: Habeas Corpus after 9/11: Confronting America's New Global Detention System. NYU Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-8147-3703-3 , p. 52.
  60. ^ The 9/11 Commission Report. 2011, p. 201.
  61. ^ The 9/11 Commission Report 2011, p. 376.
  62. ^ The 9/11 Commission Report. 2011, p. 380.
  63. ^ Dan Eggen, Bill Miller (Washington Post, May 16, 2002): Bush Was Told of Hijack Threat. White House revises account of events before Sept. 11 attacks
  64. ↑ Coleen Rowley's Memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller (May 21, 2002) Revised, APFN
  65. ↑ Stephen E. Atkins: Coleen Rowley. In: The 9/11 Encyclopedia. 2011, p. 377.
  66. ↑ A Review of the FBI's Handling of Intelligence Information Re1aded to the September 11 Attacks (November 2004) (Introduction, PDF pp. 1–4)
  67. ^ A b Douglas Jehl (New York Times, November 6, 2005): Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence Suspicions
  68. ↑ Overview over the Enemy. Staff Statement No. 15. (PDF)
  69. ↑ Kean / Hamilton: The 9/11 Commission Report. 2011, p. 228 f.
  70. ^ John Davies (ed.): Presidential Policies and the Road to the Second Iraq War: From Forty One to Forty Three. Ashgate, 2006, ISBN 0-7546-4769-2 , pp. 69-70. ; Kathryn S. Olmsted: Real Enemies , 2009, p. 220 ; Walter Pincus, Dana Milbank (Washington Post, June 17, 2004): The Iraq Connection: Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed
  71. ↑ Washington Post, June 17, 2004: Transcript: President Bush Speaks About 9/11 Commission
  72. ^ David Corn: Al Qaeda Disconnect. (The Nation, July 5, 2004). In: April Isaacs (Ed.): Critical Perspectives on Al Qaeda. 2005, Rosen Publishing Group, ISBN 1-4042-0542-X , p. 132.
  73. ^ Edward Wyatt (New York Times, July 21, 2005): Publisher Names 9/11 Charities
  74. ↑ Richard H. Ward, Latj Eem Kiernan, Daniel Mabrey: Homeland Security: An Introduction. Anderson, 2006, ISBN 1-59345-304-3 , p. 68.
  75. ^ Richard Posner (New York Times, August 29, 2004): The 9/11 Report: A Dissent
  76. ↑ Ben Yagoda (Slate, November 8, 2004): The 9/11 Commission Report: How a government committee made a piece of literature.
  77. ^ Edward Wyatt (New York Times, October 14, 2004): 9/11 Report Is National Book Award Finalist
  78. ^ Heidi Benson (Chronicle, November 12, 2004): 'The 9/11 Commission Report' is a compelling read. But does it deserve a literary award?
  79. ^ New York Times, December 6, 2007: CIA Destroyed 2 Tapes Showing Interrogations
  80. ↑ Philip Zelikow: Memorandum: Interrogations and Recordings: Relevant 9/11 Commission Requests and CIA Response (December 13, 2007, PDF)
  81. ^ Mark Mazetti (New York Times, December 13, 2007): 9/11 Panel Study Finds That CIA Withheld Tapes
  82. ↑ Thomas H. Kean, Lee Hamilton (New York Times, Jan. 2, 2008): Stonewalled by the CIA
  83. ↑ Stephen E. Atkins: Able Danger. In: The 9/11 Encyclopedia. 2011, pp. 20-23.
  84. ^ National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States: Hearing before the Select Committee on Homeland Security. House of Representatives, One Hundred Eighth Congress, second session, August 17, 2004. Diane Publishing, ISBN 1-4223-3336-1 , p. 140.
  85. ^ Matthew Lippman: Criminal Procedure. Sage Publications, 2010, ISBN 978-1-4129-8130-9 , p. 643.
  86. ↑ Robert Windrem Victor Limjoco (NBC on Jan. 30, 2008): 9/11 Commission controversy ( Memento of 7 April 2008 at the Internet Archive )
  87. ^ Democracy Now, February 7, 2008: The 9/11 Commission & Torture: How Information Gained Through Waterboarding & Harsh Interrogations Form Major Part of 9/11 Commission Report
  88. ↑ Philip Shenon ( Newsweek , March 13, 2009): The 9/11 Commission's Blind Spot
  89. ^ Carl Levin (Huffington Post, April 22, 2009): New Report: Bush Officials Tried to Shift Blame for Detainee Abuse to Low-Ranking Soldiers
  90. ↑ Philip Shenon (The Daily Beast, September 9, 2001): The Secret Files 9/11 Investigators Missed
  91. ↑ Politico, July 23, 2013: It's time to debate NSA program
  92. ↑ a b Stephen E. Atkins: Family Steering Committee. In: The 9/11 Encyclopedia. 2011, p. 167.
  93. ^ Benjamin DeMott (Harpers, July 2004): Whitewash as Public Service
  94. ^ Burt Hall, The Right-Wing Threat to Democracy: The Undoing of America's Exceptionalism. iUniverse, 2012, ISBN 1-4759-2697-9 , p. 39 f.
  95. ↑ Tom Walker (Denver Post, March 16, 2008): 9/11, awash in politics
  96. ↑ Jacob Heilbrunn (New York Times, April 13, 2008): A Lack of Intelligence (Review and synopsis by Philip Shenon: The Commission )
  97. ↑ Hope Yen (Associated Press, Feb. 3, 2008): Ties between White House, Sept. 11 chief
  98. ^ Peter Preston ( The Guardian March 23, 2008): It was nothing to do with me
  99. ^ Staff Report, Aug. 26, 2004
  100. ↑ Eric Lichtblau (New York Times, February 10, 2005): 9/11 Report Cites Many Warnings About Hijackings
  101. ^ Eric Lichtblau (New York Times, February 11, 2005): Critics Want Full Report of 9/11 Panel
  102. ^ Robert Scheer (Los Angeles Times, February 15, 2005): What We Don't Know About 9/11 Hurts Us
  103. ^ Democracy Now, November 14, 2005: LA Times Fires Longtime Progressive Columnist Robert Scheer
  104. ↑ Bob Woodward: State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III. Simon & Schuster, New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-7432-7224-7 , pp. 49-52.
  105. ^ Peter Baker (Washington Post, September 30, 2006): New Book Fuels Election Year Debate Over Bush, Rumsfeld
  106. ↑ Peter Rundlet (September 30, 2006): Bush Officials May Have Covered Up Rice-Tenet Meeting From 9/11 Commission
  107. ↑ Anthony Summers, Robbyn Swan: The Eleventh Day. 2011, p. 747.
  108. ^ George Tenet: At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA. Harper, 2007, ISBN 978-0-06-114778-4 , pp. 151-154.
  109. ^ Yonah Alexander, Michael B. Kraft (eds.): Evolution of US Counterterrorism Policy: Volume 2. ISBN 0-275-99533-X , p. 746.
  110. ^ The 9/11 Commission Report. 2011, p. 578, fn. 7
  111. ↑ Kristen Breitweiser: Wake-up Call. 2006, p. 81.
  112. ↑ Philip Shenon (The Daily Beast, August 11, 2011): An Explosive New 9/11 Charge ; Jason Leopold (Truthout, August 11, 2011): Former Counterterrorism Czar Accuses Tenet, Other CIA Officials of Cover-Up ; 911 coverup: Bombshell interview of Richard Clarke by Duffy and Nowosielski
  113. ↑ History Commons Group, 23 August 2011: The Two Statements of Tenet, Black and Blee (originals no longer available on the CIA website)
  114. ^ Ray McGovern (Counterpunch, August 17, 2011): Clarke Accuses CIA of Hiding Key Pre-9/11 Intel. Tenet and 9/11: a Real Cover-Up?
  115. ↑ National Commission on Terrorist Attacks: The 9/11 Commission Report , 2004, pp. 329f. and p. 557 , footnotes 27 and 28.
  116. ↑ Michael Moore: The Official Fahrenheit 9-11 Reader. Penguin, 2004, ISBN 0-14-192673-2 , p. 201
  117. ^ A b Christoph von Marschall: What role did Saudi Arabia play in 9/11? Tagesspiegel, September 11, 2016
  118. ↑ Bruce Maxwell: Homeland security: a documentary history. CQ Press, 2004, ISBN 1568028849 , p. 305.
  119. ^ Dana Priest, Susan Schmidt: Panel Wants All Saudi Links To Terrorists Revealed. Washington Post, December 12, 2002
  120. ^ Philip Shenon: The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation. Hachette / Little, London 2008, ISBN 978-1-4055-1175-9 , pp. 133-136
  121. ^ National Commission on Terrorist Attacks: The 9/11 Commission Report , 2004, p. 171 and p. 498 , fn. 122
  122. ↑ 9/11 probe clears Saudi Arabia. BBC, June 17, 2004
  123. ^ Andrew Cockburn: Crime and Punishment: Will the 9/11 case finally go to trial? Harpers Magazine, October 2017, p. 3.
  124. ^ Bob Graham: Intelligence matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia, and the Failure of America's War on Terror. Random House, New York 2004, ISBN 9781588364524
  125. ^ Bob Graham: Re-Open the 9/11 Investigation Now. Huffington Post, September 11, 2012
  126. ^ Paul Sperry: Inside the Saudi 9/11 coverup. New York Post, December 15, 2013; in detail in: Paul Sperry: Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives have Penetrated Washington. Thomas Nelson, 2005, ISBN 1-4185-0842-X .
  127. ↑ Bryan Bender: Rep. Stephen Lynch wants complete 9/11 report. Boston Globe, December 3, 2013
  128. ^ Andrew Cockburn: Crime and Punishment: Will the 9/11 case finally go to trial? Harpers Magazine, October 2017, p. 5.
  129. ↑ Michael Moore: The Official Fahrenheit 9-11 Reader. 2004, p. 219
  130. ↑ Samuel Oakford: US Secrecy Slammed After New Claims That Saudi Royals Supported Al Qaeda. Vice News, February 5, 2015; Eugene Kiely: Saudi Arabia and the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks. Factcheck.org, February 6, 2015
  131. ↑ Samuel Oakford (Vice News, February 6, 2015): White House Considers Declassifying 28 Pages on Alleged Saudi Government Role in 9/11
  132. ↑ Bernd Kaussler, Glenn P. Hastedt: US Foreign Policy Towards the Middle East: The Realpolitik of Deceit. Routledge / Taylor & Francis, 2017, ISBN 1138960969 , pp. 73f.
  133. ↑ Steve Kroft: 28 Pages. Former Sen. Bob Graham and others urge the Obama administration to declassify redacted pages of a report that holds 9/11 secrets. CBS April 10, 2016; Stefan Aust , Dirk Laabs : This is how Saudi agents helped the 9/11 terrorists. Welt, April 18, 2016
  134. ^ Paul Sperry: How US covered up Saudi role in 9/11. New York Post, April 17, 2016
  135. ^ Brian P. McGlinchey: Those Secret 28 Pages on 9/11: Read This Before You Read Them. 28pages.org, July 14, 2016; The Declassified 28 Pages. (Transcript); Facsimile (pdf)
  136. ↑ Bernd Kaussler, Glenn P. Hastedt: US Foreign Policy Towards the Middle East , 2017, p. 74
  137. ↑ Jim Sciutto, Ryan Browne, Deirdre Walsh: Congress releases secret '28 pages' on alleged Saudi 9/11 ties. CNN, July 16, 2016; Mark Mazzetti: In 9/11 Document, View of a Saudi Effort to Thwart US Action on Al Qaeda. New York Times, July 15, 2016; Erica Werner: Congress releases once-classified pages of 9/11 report. Boston Globe, July 15, 2016
  138. ^ Andrew Cockburn: Crime and Punishment: Will the 9/11 case finally go to trial? Harpers Magazine, October 2017, p. 6.
  139. ^ A b Andrew Cockburn: Crime and Punishment: Will the 9/11 case finally go to trial? Harpers Magazine, October 2017, p. 7.
  140. ↑ Caleb Hannan: One Man's Quest to Prove Saudi Arabia Bankrolled 9/11. Politico, April 7, 2017; UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK: Case 1: 17-cv-02003 Document 1 Filed 03/20/17 ( Indictment , PDF)
  141. ^ Andrew Cockburn: Crime and Punishment: Will the 9/11 case finally go to trial? Harpers Magazine, October 2017, p. 4.
  142. ↑ Judge allows lawsuits against Saudi Arabia over 9/11. Time online, March 29, 2018
  143. ↑ Jeff Stein: CIA and Saudi Arabia Conspired to keep 9/11 Details Secret, New Book Says. Newsweek, August 28, 2018; Ray Nowosielski, John Duffy: The Watchdogs Didn't Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror. Hot Books, 2018, ISBN 1510721363
  144. ↑ Manoj Joshi: India helped FBI trace ISI terrorist left. Times of India, October 9, 2001
  145. ↑ James Taranto: Our Friends the Pakistanis. Wall Street Journal (Opinionjournal) October 10, 2001; Michael Meacher: The Pakistan connection. The Guardian, July 22, 2004
  146. ↑ Officials: Alleged al Qaeda paymaster in custody. CNN, March 4, 2003
  147. ↑ Pervez Iqbal Siddiqui: 'Umar Sheikh HuJI's Atta link. Times Of India, June 25, 2007
  148. ↑ Anthony Summers, Robbyn Swan: The Eleventh Day. 2011, pos. 11229 (fn. 14 to chapter 28)
  149. ^ Paul Sperry: Infiltration. 2005, p. 191 ; Paul Sperry (WorldNetDaily, March 28, 2004): FBI informant revealed 9-11 plot in April 2001
  150. ↑ Paul Sperry (WorldsNetDaily, April 6, 2004): 9-11 panel to probe FBI informant's tip. Man who translated lead on al-Qaida plot confirms meeting with 3 investigators
  151. ↑ Jeffrey W. Kassing: Dissent in Organizations. Polity Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-7456-5140-8 , p. 10 .; Sibel Edmonds, Bill Weaver (NSWC, Sep 5, 2006): The 9/11 Commission: A Play on Nothing in Three Acts
  152. ↑ Memorandum for the Record: Interview of Beehroz Sarshar, former FBI translator (February 12, 2004)
  153. ↑ Sibel Edmonds (Boiling Frogs, January 31, 2011): 9/11 Family Members Demand Answers from the 9/11 Commission: The Censored Testimony of FBI's Behrooz Sarshar
  154. ↑ Sibel Edmonds (OpEdNews, February 2, 2011): The FBI "Kamikaze Pilots" Case; Omitted From 911 Commission Report
  155. ↑ Anthony Summers, Robbyn Swan: The Eleventh Day. 2011, pp. 97 and 117f.
  156. ↑ Anthony Summers, Robbyn Swan: The Eleventh Day. 2011, pp. 6, 119f., 161, 168-170, 244.
  157. ^ Paul Craig Roberts: How America Was Lost: From 9/11 to the Police / Welfare State. Atwell, 2014, ISBN 0986036293 , p. 188
  158. ^ Creation of the Department of Homeland Security DHS, November 2014.
  159. ↑ US Department of Homeland Security: Implementing 9/11 Commission Recommendations - Progress Report 2011 (PDF)
  160. ↑ Arjen Boin: Govering after Crisis: The Politics of Investigation, Accountability and Learning. Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 278.
  161. ↑ John D. Rockefeller, Christopher S. Bond (eds.): Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by US Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information. Bernan Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-16-080957-6 , pp. 59 , 62 , 72 and 149
  162. ↑ Jonathan S. Landay (McClatchy Newspapers, April 21, 2009): Report: Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link
  163. ↑ Rebecca Gordon: Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States. Oxford University Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-933643-2 , p. 160.
  164. ↑ Kathryn S. Olmsted: Real Enemies , 2009, p. 60.
  165. ↑ Kathryn S. Olmsted: Real Enemies , 2009, pp. 214-220.
  166. ^ Ed Vulliamy (The Guardian, May 19, 2002): A bad call?
  167. ^ Arthur Naiman, Gregg Roberts (AE911Truth): 9/11: The Simple Facts: Why the Official Story Can't Possibly Be True. Soft Skull Press, 2011, ISBN 978-1-59376-424-1 , p. 9.
  168. ^ Edward Hendrie: 9/11 Enemies Foreign and Domestic. 2nd edition, Great Mountain Publishing, 2011, ISBN 978-0-9832627-3-2 , p. 99.
  169. ^ The 9/11 Commission Report 2011, p. 293. , p. 302. , p. 305 ; on the evacuation order for 7 WTC: p. 550, fn. 155
  170. ^ Mark H. Gaffney, The 9/11 Mystery Plane: And the Vanishing of America. Trine Day, 2008, ISBN 978-0-9799886-0-8 , p. 22.
  171. ^ Peter Dale Scott: The Road to 9/11. 2007, p. 196.
  172. ↑ Stephen E. Atkins: North American Aerospace Defense Command. In: The 9/11 Encyclopedia. 2nd edition, ABC-Clio, 2011, ISBN 1-59884-921-2 , p. 329
  173. ↑ Michael C. Ruppert: Crossing the Rubicon , 2004, p. 310 ; Jim Marrs: The Terror Conspiracy , 2006, p. 331 ; Paul Zarembka: The Hidden History of 9/11 , 2011, p. 169 ; Webster Tarpley: 9/11 Synthetic Terror , 2013, pp. 190 ff .; Barrie Zwicker: Towers of Deception , 2013, p. 62 f.
  174. ^ The 9/11 Commission Report: The Attack from Planning to Aftermath. 2011, p. 565 f., Fn. 15
  175. ↑ Michael Bronner (Vanity Fair, September 11, 2006): 9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes